Share Of Voice: How to Turn up the Volume Over Your Competition

WHEN it comes to social media, having a strong share of voice is key. If you are not familiar with share of voice for social media, it is basically a measurement that tells what percentage you (or your brand) has of the conversation in your industry or topic.

If your company has only a small percentage, then your competitors are winning the social share of voice battle.

We can’t have that, now can we?

Having a smaller piece of the conversation can ultimately lead to leaving quite a bit of social traffic to your website on the table. Not only that, but it can leave a lot of potential business missing from your bottom line.

Once you know your share of voice on social media, you can look at ways to improve it and ultimately make a positive impact on your business.

How Can You Find Social Share of Voice?

So you are probably wondering, “how can I find my share of voice?”

One of the easiest ways is to use SocialMention – don’t worry, it’s free.

But before we go diving into finding your share of social voice, you first need to know who your key competitors are. At a minimum, I like to have at least 2-3 competitors known.

Once you have your competitors identified, head over to SocialMention.

In the search box, type in your first competitor’s name in quotation marks.

Make sure that “Microblogs” is selected and then run the search. This will only pull Twitter results.

On the results page, you will be presented with all recent mentions of that competitor on Twitter. Please note that SocialMention will only go back 30 days for data.

The results will give you a breakdown of the mentions. For the purpose of this analysis, you will want to focus on the “Sentiment” section which shows a breakdown of positive, neutral, and negative mentions.

You will want to save this data in an Excel file so that you can easily document each of the competitors against your brand.

Nothing real fancy, just enter the data as you get it. Then create a “Total” column where you add up the positive, neutral, and negative mentions. Followed by a column for “Share of Voice” which is calculated by dividing the total for that competitor by all total mentions between all companies you are tracking.

So in this case, Competitor 1 had 52 mentions. There was a total of 197 mentions between everyone. Therefore, you get the share of voice by:

(52/197)*100=26%

Then 100 simply converts the decimal number into an easier to read percentage number.

For most, this quick look can give you a decent enough picture to know your share of voice on social media.

Here’s How to Get a More In-Depth Analysis

You might have noticed that SocialMention would only really give you insight into Twitter (videos and blogs if you want).

But chances are you want to make decisions with more robust data.

One option is to use SimplyMeasured.

Just a head’s up, this won’t be free to use. However, if you are serious about your social data and analytics then you should definitely look into paying for a service like this.

SimplyMeasured has a variety of reporting features. However, we are going to use their “Share of Voice Analysis” report.

When setting up this report you can set your competitors as the “keyword”.

You’ll also get some flexibility on what channels you want to include/exclude as well as some advanced filtering.

I setup a quick analysis between popular baby formulas (Similac, Enfamil, Gerber).

Here are the results:

SimplyMeasured gives you some flexibility with the data where I have the volume chart set to show hourly volume for the past month.

This is good in that you can see what time(s) during the day get the most chatter about a specific brand.

The pie chart on the right shows the actual share of voice for each brand being monitored. In this case, we can see that Gerber overwhelmingly has the largest relative share of voice.

What to do With Share of Voice Data

Knowing how your company stacks up against the competition is only part of the social puzzle.

But what needs to be done with it to drive changes in your social accounts to get more of the share of voice?

As mentioned in the previous section, SimplyMeasured showed us what times of day peak mentions were occurring. If I am a competitor of Gerber, I would be drilling down into those peak times to see if I could figure out what is going on to drive those mentions.

Luckily, SimplyMeasured helps us out a bit in that we can see where they have the edge.

They absolutely dominate Twitter, and seem to have the upper hand on blogs and forums.

Now that we know that Twitter is the key to their success, then next thing is to dig into the data for Twitter to see what we can uncover.

One really cool thing about SimplyMeasured is that you can export the share of voice report that was created…

…and in this Excel export is a complete list of all social mentions for each competitor you were researching!

Using this data, I can easily see who is spreading the mentions for Gerber.

Simply create a pivot table in Excel and with a few tweaks you can see the top interactors for a competitor.

With this, you can then look to engage with these users in order to inject your brand into their conversations which little by little will tip the share of voice into your favour.

Aside from knowing who is sharing these mentions, you can see what is being shared.

Sifting through these results, I noticed quite a few Amazon and eBay related tweets. Perhaps the strategy could be based around looking into affiliate opportunities and reaching out to those who are pushing the competitor products.

Another thing that stood out was that there were quite a few retweets based on content from Gerber’s domain. So it would make sense to dive into that content and find out what is triggering the shares for it.

Then put a plan into place to create content that provides, even more, value as well as incorporating some share triggers.

Increasing share of voice on social media does not mean simply turning up your own frequency of social media updates. Instead, you should be looking to build up a core audience who will help amplify your messages for you.

One thing you might have noticed with the SimplyMeasured data is that it does not provide any sort of sentiment analysis. If sentiment is important to your share of voice research, you might consider using SimplyMeasured in conjunction with SocialMention.

But Does Share of Voice Matter?

When it comes to social media, there is not an end-all-be-all metric to look at when making decisions on outcomes.

For some, social media is all about the number of followers and retweets a brand gets. For others, generating email subscribers from social is a goal.

Share of voice can play a role in each of these scenarios – so it should be viewed as just a piece of the social puzzle.

These share of voice metrics should be used in conjunction with other key social metrics. Aside from growing your voice and follower base, your business will need to know what is important to them.

These can be metrics like:

• Website traffic from social media
• Sales attributed to social mentions/links

Again, you will know what is important to your business and what should be measured.

While share of voice is important to an extent, if you find that a competitor has mostly negative mentions – then are they really competition?

Instead of looking at that as a competitor, I would look at it as an opportunity.

What I mean is that if there are hundreds of unhappy people out there about a brand, then why not reach out to them to introduce yourself and start building a positive experience around your brand.

When doing this, I would be cautious to not call out your competitor or bad-mouth them in any way.

Instead, you will be looking to provide value to these upset individuals. In return, you can gain their trust and ultimately be an easy switch from your competitor to you.

Trust me, it will be easy for them to connect the dots and see how much more value you provide over the current competitor they are unhappy with.

Change Your Thinking of Social Measurement

For most people, social media metrics are typically only focused on their own social account. And most of the time that is ok.

But are you in the business of being “ok?”

I didn’t think so.

Instead of only looking at how you are performing on social media, share of voice allows you to see the bigger picture of how you fit into the conversation.

That said, when it comes to sharing your voice with your audience, it can be a tough balancing act. You want to get your message out, but the problem is you may not have the time to post content every day.

The reality is you have a business to run, right?  So, what if you could share your voice and at the same time automate the whole process?

Well, that is where Octosuite comes in.  This social media automation tool helps maximise your efforts AND enhance your share of voice.

Check it out and be heard by your audience without spending hours on end trying to turn up the volume!

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