Marketing teams use a wide range of tools to inform their strategy decisions, and there are also a plethora of metrics to be measured. An often overlooked metric is share of voice (SOV). This versatile metric can be used to analyze social media, organic traffic, and even paid advertising competitively.
With businesses spending more on their marketing budgets, it’s important to get the best value possible. For example, social media advertising budgets are expected to grow 11.76% annually by 2026.
You can use share of voice tools to assess the market clearly, including the share of market of each of your competitors. Understanding your brand’s share of voice is crucial for measuring your market presence and staying ahead of your competitors.
There are many tools to choose from, but appreciating your options allows you to make a more informed decision.
Share of voice vs. share of market
Share of voice and share of market might sound similar, but they are, in fact, quite distinct. Share of voice measures brand awareness of a particular channel, while market share is the percentage of a market that a single company controls by revenue or number of customers.
At their core, these metrics are similar in that they both measure how well your business is doing compared with your competitors. However, market share refers to the percentage you earn relating to sales, and share of voice refers to the percentage of the discussion you earn across a variety of marketing channels.
“If you manage a large-scale website or digital marketing campaigns, hosting your operations on a VPS can enhance performance and security, especially when integrating share-of-voice tools for real-time monitoring. It ensures faster data retrieval and a secure environment for handling competitive analysis” says Ivaylo Georgiev, SEO Manager of VPSBG.
How to choose the best share of voice tools
It’s possible to calculate the share of voice yourself. The formula is very simple:
Share of voice = Your brand metrics/Total market metrics
However, it’s even easier with tools that can do the hard work for you and deliver precise results. Choosing the best share of voice tools means you must consider several factors to ensure the tool meets your specific needs. These factors include data accuracy, the range of platforms tracked, and ease of integration. Also, look for real-time monitoring, customizable reports, and competitive analysis. Cost and scalability should also align with your business needs and budget.
“When choosing a Share of Voice tool, it’s essential to think beyond just tracking mentions. Look for a solution that offers actionable insights, like customizable reports and real-time monitoring, to translate data into growth.”, says Kacper Rafalski, Demand Generation Team Leader at Netguru.
Let’s explore some of your share of voice tools currently available and help you pick the best one for your needs.
1. Keyhole
Keyhole is an advanced social media analytics platform that brands can use to track their online presence, monitor campaigns, and analyze audience engagement. Features include social listening, hashtag tracking, share of voice analysis, and influencer monitoring. Keyhole provides valuable insights for companies that want to enhance their social media strategy.
Key features include an engagement rate calculator, unlimited tracking, branded dashboards, easy integrations, deep audience insights, source and measure influencers function, social media account monitoring, hashtag analytics, detailed reports, keyword tracking, and social media analytics API.
Pros
- User-friendly and engaging
- Great for limited campaigns
- Good listening insight
- Comprehensive metrics like engagement, reach, and impressions
Cons
- Can get expensive
Best for measuring how content performs across various social media platforms.
Pricing: Keyhole offers a flexible pricing approach. You can book a demo for a custom quote.
2. Awario
Awario is a social media listening tool that makes it easy to measure your brand’s and competitors’ share of voice. It’s an enterprise-level tool with small-business pricing. Using data from all social networks and the web, it delivers instant mentions of your brand, product, or keyword of any complexity.
It provides mentions, social media analytics, leads, and influencers, allowing you to make the most of social listening without a hefty price tag. With Awario, you can compare mention sentiments, as well as countries, languages, and sources.
Pros
- Market research and analysis
- Customer engagement
- Join discussions
- Reputation management
Cons
- No phone support
- No mobile apps
- Few integrations
Best for brand mention monitoring and social media listening tools.
Pricing: You can sign up for a free trial that grants you free access to the Starter plan. This plan allows you to create up to 3 alerts and find up to 30,000 mentions. After the trial expires, you can subscribe to a paid plan that fits your needs. Prices start from $28 per month. Pay yearly, and you save up to 40%.
3. Brandwatch
Brandwatch can sift through 90 million sources in 27 languages. It provides users with a web-based interface and an intuitive query creation process. Businesses can easily search social media for mentions of their brand or keyword. Analytic features like sentiment analysis, categorization, and charting can then provide further insight.
Businesses can also use the tool to effectively engage target communities by assigning workflow and easily handling and responding to social media mentions. It uses 22 Boolean Operators, more than other platforms, to deliver power and flexibility when users create queries.
Pros
- Sentiment analysis
- Data coverage
- Analytics dashboard
Cons
- Steep learning curve
- Limited integrations
- Poor response time
Best for marketers, brand managers, and analysts looking to gauge public sentiment and trends.
Pricing: Standard to enterprise plans are available for each of Brandwatch’s solutions. Prices are available upon request. You can schedule a free demo by providing an email address.
4. Talkwalker
Talkwalker is a laser-focused social media management tool. It can track your brand’s global online reputation and sentiment across various platforms, including social, print, online, TV, and radio. The tool generates actionable insights and competitive metrics for a wide range of enterprises, from small and midsize businesses to much larger enterprise customers.
“We are working with many clients in the outdoor industry, and with changes to social platforms and consumer habits changing, we needed a good monitoring solution that helped us make consumer-centric decisions and maintain client relationships,” said Mariano Rodriguez, Founder of LawRank. “Using Talkwalker, we could improve our level of client communication and track its brand’s visibility and our client’s competitors.”
The sources this tool scours include over 10 social networks, 150 million websites, and videos and images online. In-depth analytics features include brand listening, influencer monitoring, hashtag and campaign tracking, crisis management, competitor analysis, and advanced metrics.
Pros
- Comprehensive and useful help pages
- Great support by mail, phone, and virtual meeting
- Analyzes social networks, websites, radio, and TV
- Detects the use of a brand in photos and videos
Cons
- Limited Facebook and Instagram listening
- Poor data mining and sentiment tagging
Best for visual recognition.
Pricing: Talkwalker has a Free Search plan that is more like a trial for individual users. This option does not offer access to real analytics capabilities. The basic plan for businesses costs $800. Corporate and Enterprise subscriptions are available, but pricing varies depending on the customer’s needs.
5. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a social media management tool that helps brands maintain a presence on social media platforms by offering a suite of publishing, engagement, and reporting solutions. The platform’s initial focus was small and medium-sized businesses, but it has expanded to larger organizations and enterprises.
Pros
- User-friendly
- No contracts
- Robust analytics and reporting
- Free 30-day trial
Cons
- Comes with a hefty price tag
- Limited social media profiles
- Steep learning curve
Best for managing multiple social media accounts and platforms from one centralized location.
Pricing: There is no free plan, but you can try it for free with a 30-day trial. The Standard plan is $249 per month, but for each additional user, you have to pay $199 per month. The Professional plan starts at $399 per month, while the Advanced plan has users shelling out $499 per month.
6. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is an application for managing social media channels. It allows you to view multiple streams at once and monitor what customers are saying. Over 35 popular social networks, you can post updates, read responses, schedule messages, view statistics, and much more.
Hootsuite is extremely feature-rich, allowing social media managers to do just about anything and everything they might need to do. It’s also extremely easy to use, quick to set up, and painless when it comes to learning how to use it.
Pros
- Lots of social media networks supported, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, WordPress, FourSquare, and Instagram
- Relatively low cost
- Manage accounts in multiple streams
- Auto schedule posting
- Lots of apps
Cons
- Limited free account
- Training costs money
Best for data-driven marketing teams looking for a helpful way to organize content, collect data, and make informed strategy decisions.
Pricing: Hootsuite has three plans: Professional, Team, and Enterprise. When billed annually, Professional costs $99 per month, while Team costs $249 per month. The Enterprise plan can be customized for the needs of large businesses, so prices vary.
7. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a reliable tool for measuring share of voice. It’s easy to get a snapshot of your organic traffic compared to your competitors using the batch analysis feature. Alternatively, you can use it to track competitors’ share of voice by comparing them against keywords you want to rank for.
Pros
- Provides accurate keyword rankings and traffic estimations
- Detailed analysis of competitors
- Provides additional SEO metrics such as backlinks, domain authority, and traffic
- Database frequently updated
Cons
- Limited non-SEO metrics
- Vast amounts of data can be overwhelming
- No social media share of voice
Best for SEO share of voice.
Pricing: Ahrefs launched its new pricing plans in March 2022, changing the way users pay for the features used, the amount those features are used, and the data exported. The more you pay, the more features you get. If you’re just starting out, there is a limited access option for $29 per month. The next level starts at $129 per month, while the Advanced level starts at $449 per month.
8. SEMrush
SEMRush is another great all-in-one SEO tool that can also help you measure share of voice. You do this using the position tracking tool. To access it you’ll need a business subscription, but for large enterprises, the cost is worth it. As well as the position tracking tool, you can measure share of voice by location or topic and discover new competitors.
Pros
- Industry-leading SEP API
- Straightforward pricing tiers
- Social media toolkit
- Integrates with Google Analytics
- Keyword gap tool
Cons
- High learning curve
- No 24-hour customer support
Best for content marketing needs and technical SEO
Pricing: You can try this platform for free, and if you pay annually, you get a 17% discount. There are three plans to choose from: Pro at $139.95 monthly, Guru at $249.95 monthly, and the Enterprise plan starting at $5k monthly.
9. Brand24
Alt text: Brand24 – AI Social Listening Tool
Brand24 is a cutting-edge share of voice tool that helps you comprehensively track and analyze your online presence. It’s AI-driven platform provides access to mentions across a wide array of online sources, including social media, news outlets, blogs, videos, forums, podcasts, reviews, and more.
Pros
- Extensive online coverage
- In-depth reporting
- Advanced sentiment analysis
- Customer insights
- Automated reporting
Cons
- Steep learning curve
Best for brands and agencies of all sizes.
Pricing: A 14-day free trial is available, and if you choose to pay yearly for one of the plans, you can get up to 2 months free. Prices start at $119 for an individual package and go up to $399 for the enterprise package.
10. Mentionlytics
Mentionlytics is an all-in-one intelligent Social Media Monitoring Platform for tracking mentions of your brand, product, or competitors on the entire Web. It has AI-empowered features and gives unique and insightful data to its users via an extremely easy-to-use and straightforward dashboard. The quality and quantity of data make it one of the most powerful tools in the market.
Pros
- Straightforward and easy to use
- Comprehensive social media coverage
Cons
- Lacks sentiment analysis and hashtag tracking
- Best for intelligent insights and personal advice
Pricing: Mentionlytics has 5 pricing editions, and a free trial is also available. The basic plan costs $69 per month, and the Pro edition costs $399 per month.
Final words
In conclusion, selecting the right share of voice tool is essential if you want to effectively manage your brand’s presence and understand where it stands in relation to your competitors.
Whether you’re focusing on social media, SEO, or a combination of platforms, the tools highlighted in this guide offer a variety of features to suit your needs. From social listening tools to SEO-focused platforms like Ahrefs and SEMrush, there’s a solution for every business size and budget.
By carefully considering your goals and selecting a tool that aligns with your strategy, you can gain invaluable insights, enhance brand awareness, and stay ahead of the competition.
Author Bio
Veselin Mladenov is a digital marketing enthusiast and SEO strategist with 3 years of experience as a Content and Affiliate Manager of ThriveMyWay and more than 5 years in the content creation and SEO world.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is the share of voice method?
The share of voice method measures a brand’s visibility compared to competitors by analyzing its share of media coverage, mentions, or ad presence across various channels. It helps gauge how much of the “conversation” your brand controls, providing insights into brand awareness and competitive positioning.
2. What are share of voice measuring tools?
A share of voice measuring tools tracks and analyzes a brand’s visibility across channels, including social media, paid ads, and organic search. It compares your brand’s mentions or ad presence to competitors, offering insights into your market presence, brand awareness, and audience engagement in relation to others.
3. What are the share of voice keywords?
Share of voice keywords are specific terms or phrases that measure your brand’s visibility in search engine results compared to competitors. They track how often your brand tanks for important keywords, helping you assess your share of organic search traffic and influence within your industry.
