What Is Share of Voice? — Free Tool
Share of voice is your slice of the conversation in your category. The formula, why the competitor set you choose decides the answer, and why volume is not the same as favourability.
Your brand's share of all online conversation in your category, usually mentions about you divided by mentions about you plus your named competitors.
What it is
Share of voice is how much of the conversation in your category is about you rather than your competitors. It is a relative metric: it moves when rivals get quieter just as much as when you get louder.
How it is measured
Mentions of your brand divided by total mentions of your brand plus your named competitors, times 100. Twelve hundred mentions against a category total of eight thousand is 15 percent. The stronger variant weights each mention by the poster's reach, so a mention seen by two million counts for more than one seen by fifty.
Commonly misunderstood
The competitor set does more work than the maths. Pick three rivals and your share looks strong; pick eight and it collapses, with no change in the market at all. So the set must be fixed, documented and reused. The second blind spot is sentiment: share of voice counts mentions without caring whether they are praise or a recall notice, so a bad week can look like a marketing win. The third is query quality. Brand names that are also common words, or that collide with an unrelated company, will inflate your count unless the query excludes them, and a query rewritten mid-year silently breaks the trend line.
When it matters
Share of voice is a category-position metric, useful for judging whether you are gaining ground on rivals over quarters rather than weeks. Read it alongside sentiment and never on its own.
Related terms
Features
- The share of voice formula written out, with a worked example
- Mention-based versus impression-weighted share of voice
- Why the competitor set you pick determines the result more than your marketing does
- The sentiment blind spot: a crisis raises share of voice
- How to define a repeatable query so the number means something over time
Frequently asked questions
What is the share of voice formula?
Your mentions divided by total category mentions, times 100. Twelve hundred mentions of you against a category total of eight thousand is 1200 / 8000 x 100 = 15 percent.
Should I weight by reach?
If you can. A mention from an account with two million followers is not equivalent to one from an account with fifty. Impression-weighted share of voice, where each mention is multiplied by the poster's reach, is the more honest version, and most listening tools support it.
Who belongs in the competitor set?
Whoever a buyer actually considers instead of you, and the set has to stay fixed. Adding or dropping one competitor moves your percentage without anything changing in the market, so lock the set and note it on every report.
Does share of voice measure sentiment?
No, and this is its most dangerous blind spot. A product recall or a viral complaint sends share of voice up. Always report it next to a sentiment split, or you will celebrate the wrong week.
Is paid share of voice a different metric?
Yes. In advertising, share of voice sometimes means your share of category ad spend or impressions rather than of organic conversation. Say which one you mean, because the two can point in opposite directions.
