Share of voice: is your brand heard over its rivals?

Ask a business owner what they want from PR and the answer is rarely more cuttings. It is closer to this: when people read about our category, do they read about us, or about the company down the road? A monthly coverage count cannot answer that. Share of voice can, and it has the rare advantage of meaning the same thing to a marketing team, a founder and a board.

The catch is that it is simple to work out and just as simple to get wrong. The sum fits on one line. What makes the result trustworthy, or quietly misleading, is everything decided before the sum: which rivals, which publications, which period, and whether a front-page feature counts for more than a passing mention.

The sum itself

Take your brand's mentions, divide them by the mentions of your brand and your chosen competitors combined, and multiply by 100. Say your business appeared in 30 pieces of coverage over a quarter, and three named competitors appeared in 90 between them. The whole conversation is 120 pieces, and your share of it is 25 percent.

That is all the formula does. It tells you how visible you were compared with your rivals. It says nothing about whether the coverage was good or whether it changed anything. The rest of this guide is about making sure your 30 and their 90 were counted by the same rules, because the figure is only as reliable as that consistency.

Agree the rival list first, and in writing

Who counts as a competitor is the decision with the biggest effect on the number, and it is often made in passing. If you work with a PR agency, settle the list with them in writing when the engagement starts. A list that shifts from one quarter to the next produces a figure that rises and falls for reasons nobody can explain.

• Keep it tight: three to five named competitors usually describes a category well. Much more and the count becomes a research project.
• Choose the businesses you genuinely measure yourself against, not simply the biggest names in your sector. A regional brand compared with a global one learns very little.
• Settle how parent companies, sub-brands and spokespeople are treated. If a rival's chief executive is quoted, is that a mention of the rival? Decide once and write it down.
• Leave space for a newcomer, but add them on purpose: restate earlier periods if you can, and flag the change in the report.

Decide where you are counting

The next question is which coverage goes into the count. Your share across all online news is one number. Your share in the publications your customers actually read is another, and adding social media mentions gives a third. Each can be valid. Blending them without saying so is not.

In the Gulf, language matters as much as the choice of outlet. A brand that leads English-language business coverage can barely register in Arabic media, and one combined percentage hides that entirely. If your customers read in both languages, ask for English and Arabic reported separately as well as together. That split is often the most useful thing the report tells you.

Keep a written source list: the publications, the media types, the languages and the date range. Anyone who repeats the count later, whether a new agency or your own team checking the work, should arrive at the same answer.

Not every mention is worth the same

A straight count puts a feature in a national business title on a par with one line in a round-up on a minor website. You know those are not equal, and a share of voice that ignores the difference can reward a competitor whose main talent is sending out press releases.

Weighting by outlet tier deals with most of this. Assign each tier a weight, multiply every mention by the weight of its tier, and work out the share from the weighted totals instead of the raw ones. The weights are a choice rather than a fact, so they should be simple, fixed from one period to the next, and stated in the report.

Here is how it plays out with a weight of 3 for Tier 1, 2 for Tier 2 and 1 for Tier 3. Your brand has 6 Tier 1 pieces, 10 Tier 2 and 14 Tier 3, a weighted score of 52. The competitors between them have 10 Tier 1, 30 Tier 2 and 50 Tier 3, a weighted score of 140. Your raw share was 25 percent. Your weighted share is 52 out of 192, roughly 27 percent, because more of your coverage appeared in the outlets that carry the most weight.

Some teams go further and weight by sentiment or prominence, perhaps scoring a negative story at zero or a passing mention at half. That can be reasonable, but each extra weight is one more judgement you are being asked to accept. Only add them if you have asked what they would reveal, and never change them part way through a year.

A share of voice figure exists to be compared, so above all it has to be comparable. Change the method every quarter and the trend line becomes noise.

The limits you should know about

A good agency will be open about what the number cannot do. If yours is not, raise these points yourself.

• It is relative. Your share can rise in a month when your own coverage fell, simply because a competitor went quiet.
• It carries no sentiment of its own. A crisis can deliver an excellent share of voice.
• It only sees the agreed sources. Anything outside the list, including print and broadcast that was not captured, does not exist as far as the figure is concerned.
• It does not prove impact. Like any coverage measure, it can be plotted alongside branded search or enquiries on the same timeline, but all it can show is correlation.

What a useful report looks like

Look for share of voice shown as a trend across several periods, not a single month, with the rival list, sources and weights written underneath. Raw and weighted figures should sit next to each other, so you can see what the weighting changed. Where a competitor spiked, the report should explain why if the reason is known: a product launch, a results announcement, or a story that went badly for them.

Your own side of the count is the straightforward half, as long as each piece of coverage has been logged the same way every time, with its publication, tier, language and date. The competitors' side has to follow exactly the same rules. Those rules matter more than whichever monitoring tool does the counting.

If you would like a share of voice measure your board can rely on, or a second view of the one you already receive, talk to ALXO about the rivals and publications that matter in your category.