How to Measure Social Share of Voice across Channels

Imagine being at a crowded networking event. There are always some people who get noticed more, talked to or about and have the loudest voice in the room. Share of voice (SOV) is like that for the virtual space. Social media share of voice depicts the percentage of market conversation that your brand owns compared to competitors.

As a marketer, understanding your SOV is essential to stay relevant. A higher SOV isn’t just a key social media metric you must tick off your list: it shows stronger brand awareness, competitive advantage and a higher chance of influencing purchase decisions. In this guide, we’ll tell you how to measure SOV, why it's important for your marketing strategy and actionable tips to increase it.

What is social media share of voice?

Share of voice on social media is a measure that calculates the percentage of the online conversation your brand captures compared to your industry or competitors. It does this by tracking mentions, brand visibility, influence and authority among industry discussions across various social platforms.

For instance, a study by Trustpilot found that online reputation is the most important factor when customers make a purchase — over 93% said they read reviews before buying online. By analyzing SOV, you can assess your brand’s competitive standing and find new growth opportunities. This eventually improves lead generation, customer loyalty and revenue growth.

Here’s how to measure social share of voice:

Regularly tracking SOV can help you adapt to market shifts, stay competitive and top-of-mind for your audience.

Why share of voice social media is must-have for growth

In a saturated social media space, brands compete not just for attention but for dominance in conversations. Share of voice on social media indicates how much of that conversation your brand controls and surfaces opportunity to shape consumer perception. Tracking SOV isn’t just about measuring mentions — it’s about understanding your competitive standing, gauging engagement and finding opportunities to strengthen your presence.

Here’s what measuring SOV can help you with:

1. Tracking brand growth

Social media share of voice gives you long-term insights into your brand’s visibility and growth online. If mentions and SOV increase, it means your marketing campaigns and strategies are paying off to boost awareness, positioning you as a key player.

2. Understanding audience engagement

Higher engagement on social media is important because it signals audience interest and connection. It indicates that your content resonates, fostering stronger relationships and trust. More mentions often reflect higher engagement.

However, it’s not just about volume; the quality of interactions matters. Social media share of voice also sets the context by measuring customer sentiment — positive or negative mentions — giving deeper insight into audience engagement and perception.

Also Read: How To Perform Social Media Sentiment Analysis

3. Refining content strategies

Tracking share of voice on social media can help identify campaigns or topics that drive the most conversation. With this, you can pinpoint the types of content that resonate with your audience, whether it's certain themes, formats or messaging styles. You can then fine-tune your social media content strategy to engage your audience better, ultimately improving your content marketing.

4. Conducting competitive analysis

Perhaps one of the most important benefits of tracking share of voice in social media is to understand how your mentions compare to competitors.

Say your competitor consistently clocks more mentions, understanding why — whether it’s due to better engagement, superior content or effective campaign strategies — can inform your approach to your own social media marketing strategy. Social media competitor analysis helps you get an edge over competitors, whether that’s by improving niche conversations or doubling down on high-impact topics.

How to measure social share of voice on Sprinklr

Sprinklr provides a suite of products that can help measure share of voice on social media for specific aspects.

For instance, you may want to track SOV against your competitors, understand customer sentiment of mentions or track your content performance. For each of these, Sprinklr’s unique tools and features can enhance the accuracy and depth of your analysis, helping not only track your share of voice on social media but also gain actionable insights.

Here’s how you can use Sprinklr tools:

1. Track customer sentiment

All mentions are not equal. Customer sentiment in conversations can tell you whether your users have a positive or negative perception of your brand. Sprinklr’s social listening tool monitors all unstructured conversations online in real time to uncover insights about customer sentiment and shares reports in a single platform.

How to use it:

1. Track all conversations: UseSprinklr’s social listening tool to understand the nuances of sentiment. Comb through billions of data points to monitor brand mentions across 30+ social and digital channels. You can also track visual brand mentions on images, videos and more.
2. Leverage AI to decode sentiment: Sprinklr’s patented AI capabilities analyze complex language, sarcasm and emojis in all brand mentions to classify sentiment as positive, negative or neutral accurately. With this, you can not only get your share of voice on social media, but also understand whether this is in your favor or against you.
3. Set custom alerts: To monitor customer sentiment shifts in real time, you can create sentiment-based triggers for critical moments, like customer dissatisfaction or influencer missteps. This will help you correct your course immediately and shift back into a positive tone.
4. Get real-time insights: Using Sprinklr’s market-leading sentiment analysis tool detect emerging themes and anomalies instantly from billions of data points. This will help you act before negative sentiment impacts your social share of voice.
5. Visualize insights: Use pre-built dashboards to explore sentiment trends by content type, media mix or customer tone visually, making it easier to understand. You can also schedule and create reports with SOV breakdowns, consumer sentiment shifts and competitive gaps to keep stakeholders informed.

If you want to track consumer sentiment on social channels, book a demo of Sprinklr’s social listening tool.

2. Understand competitive landscape

If your competition is outperforming you, tracking SOV can help optimize your social media strategy. Sprinklr’s competitive insights and benchmarking tool lets you analyze your social performance against competition across 8 social channels. Among other things, you can track your mentions across various social channels, countries, demographics and then, look at how these stack up against competition.

How to use it:

1. Identify competitors and key channels: Start by listing your key competitors and the top platforms where your audience is active. Sprinklr offers brand identification and comparison dashboards to help you find and monitor competition.
2. Define KPIs: While mentions would be the top key performance indicator to track for share of voice, you can also track engagement, reach and sentiment to benchmark against competitors on Sprinklr.
3. Leverage AI for insights: Automate data collection across social channels and set alerts for changes in competitors' SOV to react swiftly. Sprinklr’s benchmarking smart alerts dashboard can ensure you don’t miss any spikes or dips in competitor SOV.
4. Analyze mentions: Study competitor’s posts, mentions and hashtags to understand which competitor brands have the maximum and minimum number of fan messages. The Compare Voice of Fan dashboard can help you with this.
5. Automate reporting: Schedule and share detailed SOV insights with stakeholders for strategic decision-making.

3. Monitor content performance

If you aren’t getting the share of voice in social media that you would like, you may want to conduct a social media audit of your content to understand the effectiveness of your social media posts.

To do this, analyze posts of competitors who are garnering a higher social share of voice. Sprinklr’s competitive insights and benchmarking tool can be used to efficiently track, benchmark and refine content strategies to improve mentions and engagement.

How to use it:

1. Identify competitors: As before, you can use Sprinklr’s competitive monitoring to track rival brands whose content performance is top-notch. In addition, Sprinklr lets you compare the social presence of executives from your organization against that of competitors to see whether that is having an impact.
2. Track content performance: Leverage Sprinklr’s pre-built dashboards to benchmark against competitors for content strategy. You can compare top-performing posts, themes, tones and media usage to evaluate the content mix of images, videos or text and their impact on audience engagement.
3. Monitor audience behavior:Assess how competitor content resonates with audiences by examining sentiment and behavior trends.
4. Leverage influencer analysis: You can also benchmark performance of your influencer posts against that of competitors to identify gaps.
5. Set alerts for competitor posts: Set up real-time alerts for content spikes or dips from competitors. This will help you react faster to competitor actions and adjust your strategy accordingly.

Curious about what else Sprinklr’s competitive insights and benchmarking tool can do for your brand? Book a demo and find out!

Tips to increase your share of voice on social media

If you are dissatisfied with your social media share of voice, you can improve it to boost your visibility and carve out a strong social media presence. All you need is an actionable strategy, bolstered by the right tools. Below are four tips to actively boost your share of voice:

1. Tap into social media trends

Engaging with the latest social media trends is one of the fastest ways to amplify your brand’s share of voice. Active social media users often catch on to trending topics and when you ride that wave, it can significantly expand your reach and brand visibility. It helps your brand become part of a larger cultural movement, increasing its potential for greater engagement.

Also Read: How to Find Social Media Trends

Tips to leverage trends:

• Monitor trending hashtags: Use a social media analysis tool like Sprinklr to monitor hashtags and trending topics on platforms like Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn to spot opportunities for participation.
• Watch your competition: Tracking what your competitors are talking about and how much engagement it is getting can help you become part of that conversation.
• Make it unique: If you want your brand to stand out, put a spin on the trend and align it with your brand’s voice for authentic involvement.

For instance, in 2018, Wendy’s created National Roast Day to roast fans and fellow brands. Instead of staying away, brands like Oreo and 7 Eleven requested to be roasted, making the viral campaign a part of their own social media strategy.

Source

2. Craft share-worthy content

Content that resonates with your audience on an emotional level or provides clear value will have higher social media interactions and be more share-worthy. When users share content with their networks, it amplifies your brand’s reach, increasing visibility and engagement.

This can directly boost your share of voice. To make your content share-worthy, create posts that are entertaining, educational, inspiring and/or relatable.

Tips to create shareable content:

• Understand your audience: The first step to create great content is to understand audience demographics, their interests, pain points and behavior. You can then create content that speaks to them directly.
• Experiment with formats: Try different formats like text, images, infographics, videos, reels and memes on different social platforms to see what resonates with your audience. For instance, videos are becoming popular on LinkedIn, with viewership up 36% YoY and weekly immersive video views up 6 times QoQ.
• Make sharing easy: Encourage your audience to share your content easily by including social sharing buttons and prompts.

3. Collaborate with relevant influencers and brands

Posts that are created by or with influencers have 4.7 times greater engagement rates than those without influencers. Influencer partnerships and brand collaborations provide a powerful opportunity to expand your reach and boost share of voice.

By partnering with well-known figures or brands that align with your values, you tap into their established audiences, increasing your SOV through their advocacy.

Tips for influencer and brand collaborations:

• Leverage AI: AI-powered tools can comb through millions of influencer profiles including scanning their demographics, topics of interest, industries, content themes and social channels to find the right match to ensure the social media collaboration feels authentic.
• Use data-driven insights: Use data analytics and KPIs like engagement metrics or audience demographics to find the right content to share a content strategy with influencers for targeted collaborations.
• Co-create content with relevant brands: Collaborate with brands who are complementary to your own products and create content that is valuable to both audiences. For instance, if you are a fitness brand, you can collaborate with a fitness equipment manufacturer to target overlapping audiences. This creates cross-promotion opportunities to boost engagement for both brands.

4. Convert employees into advocates

Don’t focus solely on your customers. Your employees can be among your most powerful advocates and empowering them to post about your brand on social media can naturally increase your social share of voice.

Employee advocacy not only strengthens your brand's visibility but also creates authentic, trust-driven mentions that resonate more deeply with audiences. For instance, Lenovo leveraged Sprinklr’s employee advocacy platform to boost its social media sharing by 360% in just six months.

Tips to improve employee advocacy:

• Provide tools and training: Make it easy for employees to share content about your brand on social media using tools like employee advocacy platforms or pre-approved posts. Also encourage them to share personal experiences with the brand.
• Incentivize participation: Establish a reward system where top advocates are publicly recognized and incentivized. Gamifying the experience with rewards for the highest engagement can fuel ongoing participation and elevate brand visibility. For instance, Lenovo rewarded top advocates with all-expenses paid trips.

Amplify your brand’s impact

Tracking and improving social media share of voice is a powerful strategy that can directly tie to key business outcomes. With increased SOV, you can improve brand visibility and engagement, eventually boosting lead generation, brand loyalty and revenue growth. A higher SOV ensures your brand is heard amidst competitors, fosters deeper customer relationships, gives you a competitive edge and drives long-term success.

Want to elevate your brand’s share of voice on social media? Give Sprinklr Social a try. Our unified platform comes with top-notch features like social listening, competitive benchmarking, publishing and engagement, employee advocacy and more that can amplify your voice across social media channels.