SOV Definition: Share of Voice and How to Measure It
SOV stands for share of voice: the percentage of all the advertising, mentions or visibility in a market that belongs to one brand, compared with its competitors, calculated as that brand’s figure divided by the total for every brand compared, times 100.
This page works through that marketing definition of SOV, formula first. If you meant a different SOV:
- Construction billing: a schedule of values, the line-item breakdown a contractor bills against.
- Linguistics: subject–object–verb word order, as in Japanese and Korean.
- British slang: a “sov” is a pound, from the old sovereign coin.
- Engineering: a solenoid-operated or shut-off valve.
Each is explained under other meanings of SOV.
Table of Contents
- SOV Definition and Formula
- How to Calculate Share of Voice on Social Media by Hand
- What Is a Good Share of Voice Percentage?
- Share of Voice vs Share of Market vs Share of Search
- AI Share of Voice: Mentions in ChatGPT and AI Overviews
- How to Grow Share of Voice Without Paid Ads
- Where SOV Sits Next to Engagement and Reach
- Other Meanings of SOV
- Frequently Asked Questions
SOV Definition and Formula
Share of voice divides one brand’s figure by the total for every brand you track, over the same period and in the same channel.
SOV (%) = your brand’s figure ÷ the total for all brands tracked × 100
The term comes from advertising. The Cambridge Business English Dictionary defines share of voice as “the degree to which people see a company’s advertisements, etc. in a particular market, compared to those of competitors,” and the effectiveness researchers Les Binet and Peter Field note that it is typically defined as a brand’s share of all advertising spend in its category. Marketers now run the same division on other channels:
| Type of SOV | What you count for each brand | Where the numbers come from |
|---|---|---|
| Advertising | Ad spend or ad impressions | Media agencies, ad-spend estimates |
| Social | Posts that mention the name, @handle or branded hashtag | Platform search by hand, or a listening tool |
| Earned media | Articles and podcasts that mention the brand | News search, media monitoring |
| Search | Searches for the brand name (share of search) | Google Trends, keyword tools |
| AI answers | AI-generated answers that name the brand | Repeated prompts, by hand or with a tracker |
In a report it reads like “Our social SOV rose from 18% to 24% after the launch” (an illustrative line). Say which type you mean, because the percentages are not interchangeable.
How to Calculate Share of Voice on Social Media by Hand
Pick three competitors, count every public post that mentions each brand over the same 30 days, and divide each count by the total. A first read needs a fixed method, not a listening tool:
- Fix the set: you plus three competitors your customers really compare you with. Changing the set changes every percentage, so keep it for a year.
- Write a query list per brand: name, @handle, branded hashtag and common misspellings.
- Search the platforms where your category talks. Where search takes a date range (Bluesky accepts
since:anduntil:operators, for example), set it to the last 30 days; elsewhere, work through the latest results and stop at posts older than 30 days. - Log each mention: date, platform, link and tone (positive, neutral or negative). Leave out each brand’s own posts, because you are measuring what other people say.
- Divide each brand’s count by the total and multiply by 100.
The arithmetic for an illustrative local coffee roaster:
| Brand | Mentions in 30 days | Share of voice |
|---|---|---|
| You (a local roaster) | 42 | 21% |
| Competitor A (a regional chain) | 96 | 48% |
| Competitor B | 38 | 19% |
| Competitor C | 24 | 12% |
| Total | 200 | 100% |
Two refinements: sum the likes, comments and shares on each brand’s mentions for a share of engagement, and count negative mentions separately so complaints do not read as a win. Count monthly, judge the trend quarterly. Our free social media report template has no share-of-voice row, but its editable executive summary can carry the SOV line beside your per-platform results.
What Is a Good Share of Voice Percentage?
There is no universal good share of voice; judge yours against three yardsticks: fair share, share of market and your own trend. No benchmark band for social SOV holds up, because the result depends on which competitors you count.
- Fair share: 100% divided by the number of brands tracked. With four brands it is 25%, so the roaster’s 21% is a little under, and Competitor A’s 48% is nearly double.
- Share of market: analysing the IPA Databank of advertising effectiveness cases for LinkedIn’s B2B Institute in 2019, Binet and Field wrote that “brands that set their share of voice (SOV) above their share of market (SOM) tend to grow (all other factors being equal), and those that set SOV below SOM tend to shrink.” The gap, SOV minus SOM, is excess or extra share of voice (ESOV). Ten points of ESOV lifted market share by about 0.6 percentage points a year for consumer brands and 0.7 for B2B brands, a B2B finding they call tentative because it rests on fewer than 50 cases.
- Trend: a rising share against the same competitors is the clearest signal a hand count can give.
If the roaster holds an estimated 15% of local sales, its ESOV is 21 − 15 = +6 points, roughly +0.36 points of market share a year at the consumer rate. Treat that as direction, not a forecast: the rule was measured on advertising spend, and social mentions are a noisier input.
Share of Voice vs Share of Market vs Share of Search
Share of voice measures how loud you are, share of market how much you sell, and share of search how often people look you up. The gaps between them are where the insight sits.
| Metric | Formula | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Share of voice (SOV) | Your ad spend, impressions or mentions ÷ all brands’ × 100 | How much of the category’s attention you claim |
| Share of market (SOM) | Your sales ÷ category sales × 100 | What you have already won |
| Share of search (SOS) | Searches for your brand ÷ searches for all brands in the set × 100 | How much demand you are creating |
| Excess share of voice (ESOV) | SOV − SOM | Whether your voice is big enough to grow |
Les Binet and James Hankins presented share of search at the IPA’s EffWorks conference in 2020. A later IPA think tank found that across 30 case studies in 12 categories and seven countries, share of search “appears to represent 83% of a brand’s Share of Market (SoM) on average,” while stressing that these are correlations, not proof of cause. Hankins recommends a 6 to 12 month rolling average.
To measure it for free, use Google Trends. It compares up to eight terms at once (five in its classic explore view), and because terms in one comparison share the same 0 to 100 scale, your share of search is your average score divided by the sum of every brand’s average.
AI Share of Voice: Mentions in ChatGPT and AI Overviews
AI share of voice is the share of AI-generated answers about your category that name your brand. No standard method exists yet, so pick one and keep it fixed:
- Write 20 buyer questions that name no brand, such as “best coffee beans for a home espresso machine.”
- Run them monthly in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews or AI Mode, with the same settings each time.
- Calculate AI SOV = your brand mentions ÷ all brand mentions × 100. Note which pages the answers cite, because those sources shape what the assistants say.
Answers vary between runs, accounts and locations, so treat each month as a sample.
How to Grow Share of Voice Without Paid Ads
Organic share of voice grows when more people have a reason to mention you and you are present where they talk. Five levers, from most to least in your control:
- Show up consistently where your category’s conversation happens.
- Answer your category’s questions plainly on your own site, in sentences an AI answer can quote.
- Make things worth mentioning: original numbers, a free resource, a strong opinion, an event.
- Borrow audiences through collaborations, co-hosted lives and partner posts, such as a joint giveaway.
- Make tagging easy: ask customers to tag you, and reshare the ones who do, with permission.
Software can carry the first lever: Outfeed AI drafts, previews and schedules posts for nine platforms from one chat. It does not measure share of voice (no listening, competitor tracking or analytics), so the count above stays manual.
Engagement bait does not work. A LinkedIn thread full of CFBR (“commenting for better reach”) comments inflates one post’s activity but adds no mentions of your brand, so your share of voice does not move.
Where SOV Sits Next to Engagement and Reach
Share of voice is a comparison metric: it measures you against named competitors, while engagement and reach describe your own posts. Engagement counts what people do with your content (what counts as engagement varies by platform); SOV counts how often your category mentions you at all, so a brand can earn strong engagement from its followers and still hold a tiny share of voice. In a reporting set, SOV sits with the awareness metrics and is reviewed quarterly; formulas and cadence for the rest are in our guide to social media KPIs. One-line definitions of reach, impressions and the other metrics sit in our social media glossary.
Other Meanings of SOV
Outside marketing, SOV has four other common meanings, and search results mix them.
- Schedule of values (construction): in Wikipedia’s words, “a detailed list of how much different tasks are worth in a large project, especially in construction,” used to bill the client before the project is finished. In an email: “Please attach the updated SOV to pay application 4.”
- Subject–object–verb (linguistics): a word order that puts the verb last, as in “Sam apples ate.” It is the most common dominant order in the World Atlas of Language Structures: 564 of 1,376 languages, ahead of subject–verb–object at 488. Japanese, Korean, Turkish and Hindi are SOV languages.
- “Sov” (British slang): a pound sterling, shortened from sovereign, the old gold coin. Wiktionary’s example: “That car of his has got to be worth a few sovs.”
- Engineering: a solenoid-operated or shut-off valve, both listed by AcronymFinder.
Transport planners also write SOV for a single-occupancy vehicle.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the SOV definition in marketing?
SOV stands for share of voice: the percentage of a market’s advertising, mentions or visibility that belongs to one brand, compared with its competitors. It began as a share of category ad spend and is now also measured in social mentions, searches and AI answers.
How do you calculate share of voice?
Divide your brand’s figure by the total for every brand you track over the same period, then multiply by 100. With 42 of the 200 social mentions logged for four brands in 30 days, your share of voice is 42 divided by 200, times 100: 21%.
What is a good share of voice?
There is no universal benchmark, because the result depends on which competitors you count. Compare it with your fair share (100% divided by the number of brands tracked), your share of market and your own trend. Binet and Field found that brands whose share of voice exceeds their share of market tend to grow.
What is the difference between share of voice and share of market?
Share of voice is your slice of a category’s advertising or conversation; share of market is your slice of its sales. The gap, SOV minus SOM, is excess or extra share of voice (ESOV), and in Binet and Field’s analysis a positive ESOV went with market share growth.
What free tools can measure share of voice?
For social mentions, each platform’s own search and a spreadsheet are enough to track you and three competitors, and some searches, such as Bluesky’s, accept date operators. For share of search, Google Trends compares up to eight terms at once. Paid listening tools automate the counting but use the same formula.
What else can SOV stand for?
In construction, a schedule of values, the line-item breakdown a contractor bills against. In linguistics, subject-object-verb word order, as in Japanese and Korean. In British slang, a ‘sov’ is a pound, from the sovereign coin. Engineers also use SOV for a solenoid-operated or shut-off valve.