Do you want to become a leader in your industry? Or participate in more conversations related to the products you sell? One of the best ways to do this is to increase your share of the vote.
Traditionally, share of voice (SOV) measures your brand’s exposure to the visibility of your ads compared to your competitors. But that’s not the only way to measure vote share.
In this post, we’ll cover everything you need to know about voice share, including how it works for SEO, PPC, and social media. We’ll explain why vote share matters, how to calculate it, and how to boost your visibility across the board.
Voice share is a way to measure your brand awareness in comparison to your competitors. This is a great metric to focus on if you want to increase brand awareness or sales.
In the past, share of voice has been used to measure the success of your paid advertising. The definition now includes general web visibility, including social media mentions and where you appear in search results.
What about the social share of the vote?
Social share of voice is a way to measure how many people are talking about your brand on social media. It is usually measured as a percentage of the total number of mentions in an industry or among a specific group of competitors.
In other words, the traditional share of voice tracks that brands say about themselves, and the social share of voice tracks that people say about brands.
You can also think of it as when social listening meets competitive analysis.
For example, if your brand sells sneakers, you should expect to show up in conversations about running, trainers, and sneakers. The vote share will give you an idea of how often your brand is mentioned compared to other brands in the same space.
Understanding your social share of voice puts all your other social media analytics into context.
If you want to increase your social media voice share, you need to get people talking about your brand.
This can be done in several ways, for example:
- Generating Shared Content
- Earned and paid media
- Launch of social advertising
- Collaboration with influencers
Tracking your share of voice can help you understand how visible your brand is on social media. A higher share of the voice usually results in more sales and brand awareness, so it’s definitely worth looking into.
Competitive advantage
Social Voice Share doesn’t just keep track of what people are saying about your business. It also tracks what people are saying about your competitors. Knowing what’s happening in the market and how your company is doing can help you stay ahead.
Social budgeting
Maybe your brand is talking on Twitter but not on Facebook. Tracking vote share can help you figure out where to focus your social dollars and resources.
Campaign performance
You can track how successful your social media campaigns are by the number of shares they receive. If your share increases after launching a campaign, you’ve probably come to the right place with your audience.
Customer acquisition
Show your customers that you are listening. Information derived from sentiment or theme analysis can help determine your brand voice, engagement plan, and content.
Customer data
Tracking and measuring voice share can also help you determine the value of your social media efforts in terms of leads, customers, and conversions. This data can then be used to secure a social media budget or justify an increase in resources.
Voting share can be measured using the following formula:
Your brand mentions / total industry mentions = share of votes
If you are calculating this for social networks, you can collect this data using Hootsuite Insights. Insights can help you collect mentions from multiple platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and more.
Once you have a dataset of all industry mentions, consider segmenting it to get unique insights. For example, you can segment mentions by location to see how your brand compares to competitors in different regions.
You can also apply other demographic filters such as gender, age, or occupation. This can help you see if you have a large social voice among a particular gender or age group. You can use these insights to tailor your content and outperform your competitors.
Also important is the analysis of the social share of the voice by mood and topic. Your brand may have a high social share of the voice, but if people aren’t saying nice things, you’ll want to address this issue.
Share of voice in social networks
Everything people say about your brand on social media affects your share of the voice.
This metric shows how well you are interacting with your audience and engaging in conversations that are important to them.
A high share of voice on social media can help you:
- Win new customers
- Increase brand awareness
- Increase sales
Use Hootsuite to compare your brand’s social media share with your competitors.
Share of voice for SEO
If you want to know how well you perform in search engines, you need to calculate your share of voice in SEO.
This metric measures your site’s visibility in organic search results compared to your competitors.
To calculate SEO vote share, you’ll need a list of industry-relevant keywords. These could be the keywords that get the most clicks on a particular topic, or the keywords that are related to your product or service.
You can use voice tools like Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker to compare your website’s visibility for these keywords with your competitors’ visibility. The Competitors tab will show you how often your site appears on search engine results pages (SERPs) compared to your competitors.
A high participation rate in organic search can help you:
- Attract more visitors to the site
- Get more leads and sales from your website
- Increase brand awareness and equity
Share of voice for PPC
To understand how effective your ads are, you need to measure your paid search voice share. PPC Impression Share is the percentage of your ad’s impressions compared to all other ads competing for the same keyword.
For example, if you have a vote share of 50%, this means that your ads are being shown twice as often as they could be.
If you want to find your paid advertising share, go to your Google Ads account, click Campaigns, then select Columns at the top of the table.
Select Competitive Metrics, then select the types of impression share columns you want to track.
Improving your PPC voice share can help you:
- Get more clicks and impressions
- Improve Quality Score
- Lower your CPC
Media vote share
Your media voice share is the number of mentions of your brand on news websites and blogs. For example, if your brand is mentioned in 40 articles and your competitor is mentioned in 100 articles, your share of the vote is 40%.
Social listening tools like Hootsuite Streams can also become part of the voice tools. Simply set up searches for your brand name and competitor name, then track your results over time to see how your vote share changes.
Understanding your media voice share can help you:
- Build relationships with key publications
- Create earned media coverage
- Improve SEO
Once you have a good understanding of what your brand looks like, you can focus on improving.
Here are some ways to increase your social media voice share.
1. Maintain an active presence
A tried and true way to earn a piece of your brand pie is to stay active on all of your social media. Customers are more likely to reach out to you and make contact if they know someone is there.
A good first step is to create a social media content calendar. Many important dates have a higher social appeal and you don’t want to miss out. Use a calendar to make sure you have content ready when you need it, and don’t post the same content all the time.
Also, try to post at times when your audience is most active on each network. This will ensure maximum reach and potential reach for your content.
Here’s an example from Twitter heroes Merriam-Webster, who got users into a little jubilation at the end of the week.
2. Start conversations
Since social media voice share represents brand mentions, sparking online conversations can be a good way to increase your share.
Taking a firm stand on a hot topic will definitely blow your mentions. Case in point: Nike’s partnership with Colin Kaepernick or Gillette’s #TheBestMenCanBe campaign.
But brands don’t have to engage in controversy to spark social dialogue. Bell’s annual Let’s Talk campaign positions the telecommunications company as a leader in the global discussion about mental health.
Question prompts are also extremely popular on Twitter and other platforms. When Fenty Beauty released 40 foundation shades for everyone, they asked, “Which one do you have?”and received hundreds of comments.
Or do as Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky did and just ask for ideas. His call for proposals received over 4,000 responses. A small AMA can make a big difference.
3. Create shared content
Another good way to increase your social media voice share is to post content that people will want to share. Images, GIFs and videos tend to be popular. The more original or meme-worthy, the better.
4. Respond to customers
Joining conversations about your brand is a good way to build relationships with customers and make them feel good about your company.
Showing empathy and a touch of humanity can also go a long way. A Harvard Business Review study of airline Twitter accounts found that when customer service agents signed with their initials, the customer’s willingness to pay for a future flight increased by $14.
5. Budget accordingly
By tracking your social media share of voice, you’ll get a better idea of where to invest in sponsored content, partner with social media influencers, or dedicate additional support resources.
For example, your voice is off Twitter but sounds good on Instagram? Consider hosting a Twitter chat or setting up a Twitter profile for support questions only.
Having a balanced social media strategy will allow you to focus on expanding your share of the voice where you need it most.
Remember, the social share of the voice is ultimately about tracking conversations, and conversations inspire conversions. Also, not all conversations take place on social media. Many of these occur in private messages, private channels, and offline, where they cannot be taken into account. So don’t rely on social share alone to determine your success against the competition.
It is also important to match what people say with what they do. Track social media voice share along with other metrics that are important to your business.
Hootsuite can help you track your brand’s social media voice share along with all the other social media metrics that matter to your business. Analyze your social media presence, publish and schedule posts, and engage with your followers, all from one dashboard. Try it for free today.