Share of Voice
Share of Voice is a metric for how large a brand's share is of everything that is said or shown in a market about that brand and its competitors. Originally it comes from advertising planning, but today it is also used to measure mentions in media, on social networks, and in AI chatbot responses.
If ten companies sell sneakers, not all ten talk about it equally. One pours a lot of money into advertising, another is constantly mentioned in newspapers, a third barely shows up anywhere. Share of Voice measures exactly this imbalance. The metric indicates what share a brand has of the total attention in its market. To do this, all mentions or advertising contacts of all providers are added up, and the percentage that falls on a single brand is calculated. If a company accounts for 4,000 of a total of 20,000 mentions, its Share of Voice is 20 percent.
Why market share and voice share are connected
The appeal of the metric lies in an old observation from advertising research. Brands whose voice share is greater than their market share tend to grow on average. Brands that receive less attention than their sales figures would suggest slowly shrink. Advertising experts call this difference Excess Share of Voice. It is considered a rough early indicator of the development of the coming years.
For companies, this is practical because revenue only becomes visible in hindsight. Attention, on the other hand, can be measured almost in real time. A sudden drop in voice share can be a warning sign long before sales figures fall. Conversely, a rise shows whether an expensive campaign reached anyone at all.
One important caveat: the metric counts volume, not sentiment. A scandal drives Share of Voice up but harms the brand. That’s why it is usually combined with sentiment analysis, i.e., an automatic assessment of whether mentions sound positive or negative. Only both figures together produce a meaningful picture.
How the share is calculated
The formula itself is simple: one’s own mentions divided by all mentions in the market, times one hundred. The real work lies in the question of what is actually counted. In classic advertising, it was advertising spend or contact opportunities, i.e., how often an ad was potentially seen. In online marketing, one counts search queries, clicks, or posts on social networks.
The data is collected by so-called monitoring tools. These are programs that automatically search news sites, forums, and social networks for brand names. They assign each mention to a brand and sum up the hits over a period of time, for example a month. They then compare the result with a previously defined list of competitors.
This list is the biggest source of error. Anyone who defines their competition narrowly automatically gets a high share. If you add more providers, the same value drops significantly. A Share of Voice without specifying the comparison field is therefore hardly meaningful. For the same reason, it makes sense to only compare periods that use the same measurement method.
Voice share in AI responses
In recent years, the term has gained a new field of application. More and more people are asking chatbots instead of search engines which product they should buy. Companies therefore measure how often their brand appears in such generated answers. To do this, they ask a chatbot hundreds of typical questions and count the mentions. This variant goes by names such as AI Share of Voice or Answer Engine Optimization.
The metric regularly appears in annual reports and analyst commentary when it comes to marketing budgets. Rising advertising spend without a rising voice share is considered a bad sign. Agencies also use the figure to demonstrate to clients the success of a campaign.
A typical misconception is confusing Share of Voice with reach. Reach is an absolute number: how many people have seen something. Share of Voice is relative and always depends on how loud the others currently are. A brand can double its reach and still lose share if the competition is growing even faster.