Do you think your brand is seen as an industry leader right now?
Do audiences flock to your content and engage with your information? Are people talking about your products or services organically? When people are looking for products or services in your industry, does your company get mentioned as a potential top solution?
These are the questions that determine your brand’s share of voice. And while there are many factors that contribute to how aware people are of your company, one of the biggest outlets are social media platforms.
Although social media is extremely competitive where everyone is fighting for attention and the algorithms are more challenging for branded accounts, it’s also the best way to directly make an impact on prospects, customers, future hires, and general audiences.
Below you’ll learn more about the social share of voice and tips to increase your brand visibility through social networks. It’s time you take a bigger piece of the “share of voice” pie!
What is Share of Voice?
Share of voice simply refers to the number of times your brand is mentioned on the web by your target audiences, compared to the number of your competitors. It is typically measured by the number of mentions, engagements, and how customers are interacting.
Previously, share of voice really focused on results from press mentions and then paid advertising, but social media has changed the game again.
As you know, you can now directly connect with audiences and use social listening to see mentions of your brand and how people are talking about the products or services.
And since the topic has expanded, when you focus on the social media side, you can refer to that awareness as the “social share of voice.”
Why Social Share of Voice Matters
So seriously, why is social share of voice important to understand and utilize?
Besides naturally understanding how audiences refer to your company, products, or services — it can help guide your strategies and priorities in marketing, sales, and social media. But here are a few specific reasons why boosting share of voice is important.
Insights into your company reputation
When you are boosting your share of voice on social media, you’ll find more people talking about your brand, product, and services. You also start to learn about your company reputation — both good and bad.
But your team can use this to your advantage to double down on what is working and to pivot when there are things that need improvement.
Understanding your competitors
Taking share of voice seriously, allows you to monitor and analyze your competitors. Besides monitoring your own company, you should be looking at the industry as a whole and your main competitors.
You’ll understand where your company stands and what areas your brand needs to spend more time with to get more share.
Tip: Don’t play the cat and mouse game with competitors, wasting too much time monitoring them does your brand no good. Monitor, analyze, and move on.
Helps you know where to focus social efforts on
While you’ll want to have a presence on most of the major social media platforms, understanding the share of voice tells you where your company is lagging behind.
Maybe this means a revamped paid social strategy, looking at posting more frequently to a specific social channel, or tailoring content differently to get engagement on that particular platform.
Measuring marketing campaign effectiveness
By regularly tracking your social share of voice, you can better understand the effectiveness of any marketing campaigns that your company launches. It can also help you improve future campaigns and know what to potentially avoid that did not work.
But ask yourself questions around campaigns like this:
- Are you finding people referencing your campaign or content from it?
- Do they engage with your campaign or share it themselves on social media?
How is Share of Voice Calculated in Social Media?
Before we go into how to increase your social share of voice, I think it’s important to understand how it is all calculated. It can actually be a somewhat difficult number to calculate with confidence, because some brand will measure it differently or focus on other numbers.
In the traditional sense with paid advertising, share of voice is a simple quotient: your total advertising as a dividend to the actual amount of availability.
The easy formula looks like this:
Your Advertising / Total Advertising Space * 100 = Paid Share of Voice
Naturally, there are tons of metrics your company might consider when calculating share of voice of, like:
- Mentions
- Paid Clicks
- Brand Reach
- Organic Keywords
- Impressions
- Social Shares
So if you wanted to calculate your social share of voice, you’d do something like:
Your Brand Mentions / Total Industry Mentions * 100
You can use this data for each segment and to compare against your competition to see how everyone stacks up. But it will depend on your business goals and what is important for you to monitor and calculate.
At the bare minimum, it’s important to address your company’s share of voice by reputation, attitude, and topic. You can still have a massive share of voice, but the percentage of negative views compared to positive could be high and something you’d want to know.
There are various social media tools that you can use to help you calculate your share of voice and see data that is useful to you as well.
Increase Share of Voice on Social Media
Although your share of voice matters in multiple areas, social media is one to single out. And increasing your reach, awareness, and reputation there will be a key driver in helping your business succeed.
As of writing this, more than 4.5 billion people now use the internet, while social media users have passed the 4.6 billion mark. A great reason to focus on your social share of voice!
Elevate your content marketing strategy
In B2B, content marketing sometimes gets a bad rep for being boring or unimaginative. Not always, but it is a difficult space compared to B2C when it comes to content that is super shareable by audiences.
But if you want to increase your social share of voice, your company has to elevate the content marketing strategy. Not every piece of content needs to be created to “go viral” online, but it should be intriguing enough to spark engagement, shares, and even conversations.
Be creative, educate, engage, and create content that will attract your target audiences. It seems like common sense, but you’d be surprised how lazy the content marketing is for many organizations.
A good social media plan and calendar can ensure that your content strategy is efficient and that you avoid repeating generic posts every day.
Be consistently active and engaging
Too often, brands look at their social media pages and strategy as just a way to send out content. While it is effective, your brand and people need to be consistently active and engaging audiences.
For your brand, consistent activity means responding to comments and questions on your branded social accounts.
When engaging from branded accounts, sound like a human and avoid robotic responses. Sparking these conversations keeps audiences engaged and they’ll remember that the brand is socially active and responsive.
It all impacts your share of voice as people begin to like your brand more and talk about their experiences with you.
- If you don’t respond to comments on social media, it can lead to a 15% increase in churn rate. (Gartner)
- Answering a social media complaint can increase customer advocacy by as much as 25%. (Convince and Convert)
Leverage your employee social networks
During our data analyzing we found the average employee has 1,000 social connections. If your organization has 1,000 employees helping create and share content, they have combined potential reach of 1,000,000!
There are tons of employee advocacy statistics that are impressive and can dramatically increase your company’s social share of voice. But it also puts your brand on the radar of their networks too.
Yet, the trick here is to ensure employees don’t just spam links or make everything sound like a sales pitch. Nor do you want to lock down social posts with generic marketing copy. When authentic voices, insights, and user-generated content is shared — it has a positive influence on your brand.
Wondering if it works? With EveryoneSocial, clients have seen some big social reach that impacts their share of voice, leads, sales, and more.
- Adobe Activates Employees to Expand Social Reach By 3 Million+
- Micro Focus Uses EveryoneSocial to Engage 3,000+ Employee Advocates
Create more social conversations
Besides engaging in conversations when audiences mention you or comment on content, you’ll need to also spark conversations with your networks too. How can you get your followers and audiences more involved and talking?
Sometimes, this can be taking a specific political stand or going against the grain. While you want to be genuine with this direction, you must realize that you can create tons of buzz — both good and bad.
Of course, controversy is not something your brand needs to dabble in. Instead, it can simply be getting employees and followers involved with product or services questions. Or even industry questions or professional challenges you know your target audiences face daily.
The employee influencer effect
This is another area where employees can make a big impact too, especially if they are building somewhat of a following as a thought leader. Their messages and social conversations are reaching new people who potentially aren’t familiar with your brand.
If you’re active on LinkedIn, you’ve probably seen employees from companies like Adobe, Drift, Gong, and many others that are highly active on social media and striking up conversations — which is another driver in social share of voice.
But social conversations get people involved, talking about your brand, and it can create insights that you can leverage for future content, marketing, or sales material.
Create your own branded social communities
Ah, the power of the hashtag!
Using hashtags can help your content reach audiences who are searching for content and connect with your target audiences. But, they can also be used to improve your social share of voice.
When you run specific social or marketing campaigns, it’s a good idea to come up with a hashtag that can get audiences using it. This lets you be a leader in social conversations and get people’s attention with whatever your campaigns entail.
Take a look at some of your favorite brands on social media, many are doing campaign specific hashtags where people can follow along, look for specific content, and engage.
For example, our customer Adobe uses #AdobeLife for content and social conversations around working for their company. And that hashtag has over 3,000 followers on LinkedIn alone. Plus, that doesn’t include people who click the hashtag and lurk on the content too.
But this has become a community for the Adobe employees to share their work and the Adobe culture, and a place for talent to look for career opportunities with the company as well.
And this is just one example, but there are many ways to create your own social communities that amplify your brand’s share of voice.
