Share of Voice: What It Is and How to Measure It

Share of voice is the portion of conversation about a category that belongs to your brand compared with your competitors. It answers a simple but important question: when people talk about this market, how often are they talking about you? Tracked over time and against rivals, share of voice turns the raw volume of mentions into a competitive read on who owns the conversation.

How Share of Voice Is Calculated

The basic calculation is straightforward. You measure the number of mentions your brand receives within a defined category and divide it by the total mentions for all brands you are tracking in that category. The result is your share, expressed as a percentage. If your brand and three competitors generate a combined ten thousand mentions in a month, and your brand accounts for three thousand of them, your share of voice is thirty percent. The honesty of that number depends entirely on a fair, consistent query for every brand in the set.

Choosing the Right Competitive Set

Share of voice only means something relative to the right comparison. A national brand measured against two small regional players will post an impressive figure that says little about its real standing. The competitive set should reflect the brands that genuinely compete for the same audience and attention. Defining that set thoughtfully, and keeping it consistent over time, is what makes the metric trustworthy from one report to the next.

Volume Is Not the Whole Story

A high share of voice feels like a win, but volume alone can mislead. A brand can dominate the conversation for the wrong reasons, such as a public failure or a controversy that drives heavy negative discussion. For this reason, share of voice is most useful when paired with sentiment. A large share of overwhelmingly positive conversation signals strength, while a large share of negative conversation signals a problem that happens to be loud. Reading the two together prevents a dangerous misreading.

Tracking Share of Voice Over Time

The single most valuable way to use share of voice is as a trend. A snapshot tells you where you stand today, but the movement tells the real story. A steady climb suggests your brand is winning attention, possibly at a competitor's expense. A sudden spike invites investigation into what caused it. A slow decline can be an early warning that a rival is gaining ground before that shift appears in sales. Watching the line over weeks and months turns a static figure into an ongoing signal.

Segmenting the Metric

Share of voice becomes far richer when broken into segments. You can measure it by platform to learn where your brand is strong and where it is invisible. You can measure it by topic to see whether you own the conversation about innovation, value, or service. You can measure it by region to find markets where a competitor leads. Each cut of the data points to a specific place where attention can be won or defended.

Turning Share of Voice Into Action

The metric earns its keep when it changes what a team does. A low share in a key topic might prompt a content or messaging push. A competitor's rising share might trigger a closer look at what they are doing well. A strong share in a growing category might justify further investment. Share of voice works best as a prompt for questions and decisions rather than as a scoreboard admired from a distance.

For brands that want this measured rigorously against the right competitive set, our consumer insights services build share of voice tracking intoa broader program.

Share of voice is one of the clearest ways to place a brand within its competitive landscape, provided it is measured fairly and read alongside sentiment and theme. The number itself is easy to produce. The judgment lies in defining the right comparison and interpreting the movement honestly.

At RILA Global Consulting, we analyze these real-time shifts in consumer sentiment to help brands and institutions understand how macroeconomic forces translate into perception, behavior, and strategic risk.

By the RILA Global Consulting Team