In the competitive world of brand visibility, understanding your market position is non-negotiable. Share of Voice (SOV) provides a powerful lens through which to view your brand's presence relative to your competitors, but mastering share of voice measurement can feel complex. It’s more than just counting mentions; it's about contextualising your brand's authority across various channels, from social media and news sites to forums and blogs. A comprehensive SOV analysis reveals not just how much people are talking about you, but the quality and impact of those conversations.

This guide simplifies the process. We'll walk you through a step-by-step framework for accurate share of voice measurement, covering everything from defining competitors and keywords to calculating advanced, weighted metrics. You will learn practical techniques to normalise data across different channels, visualise trends, and set actionable benchmarks. To truly understand the impact of your efforts, delving into how to measure social media success beyond vanity metrics is crucial, and SOV is a key part of that picture. Consider this your definitive resource for turning abstract data into a clear, strategic advantage.

The platform’s standout feature is its 100% natural-language AI filtering. Users can define search criteria in plain English, and ForumScout's AI then scores and delivers only the most relevant mentions. This capability, combined with its dedicated share-of-voice dashboards, sentiment analysis, and competitor "weakness finder," provides an actionable framework for strategic decision-making.

Key Details & Pricing

Plan	Monthly Cost	Mentions	Key Features for SOV
Growth	£15/mo	5,000	10 keywords, hourly scans, 30-day retention
Business	£39/mo	25,000	20 keywords, sentiment/emotion analysis, competitive dashboards
Enterprise	£103/mo	100,000	25 keywords, 180-day retention, all analytics features

A 7-day free trial is available without requiring a credit card. All plans include unlimited seats, making it exceptionally cost-effective for growing teams.

While its hourly scans are sufficient for most strategic analysis, teams needing sub-minute alerts for crisis management might find it limiting. High-volume users should also factor in the potential cost of add-ons for extended data retention or API access. Overall, it presents a compelling, well-rounded solution for any organisation serious about share of voice measurement.

Website: https://forumscout.app

The platform’s standout feature is its simplicity and speed of setup, allowing non-analysts to configure comprehensive monitoring in minutes. It automatically calculates share of voice, sentiment, and even emotional tone using Plutchik’s wheel of emotions, presenting the data in clear, easy-to-understand dashboards. Its plain-English AI filtering helps significantly reduce noise from irrelevant mentions, a common frustration with many monitoring tools.

Key Details & Use Cases

• Best For: SMBs and startups needing an affordable, straightforward tool for competitive intelligence and SOV tracking without a steep learning curve.
• Pricing: Offers a free trial and transparent, budget-friendly paid tiers starting from a very low price point. Tiers are based on clear limits for mentions and keywords.
• Pros: Extremely accessible pricing, quick setup process ideal for smaller teams, and effective AI-powered noise reduction.
• Cons: Its data footprint is smaller than legacy enterprise tools, and it has fewer native integrations compared to market leaders.

Practical Tip: Use the Google Sheets integration to pull your raw mention data directly into a spreadsheet. This allows for deeper, custom analysis and makes it easier to combine ForumScout’s data with your other marketing analytics for a more holistic view.

Website: https://forumscout.app/

The platform excels at providing highly customisable dashboards for tracking share of voice, sentiment, and emerging trends over time. Its powerful benchmarking features allow teams to rigorously compare their brand's performance against multiple competitors. While its complexity and feature depth are geared towards large teams with dedicated analysts, its robust workflows for reporting and insight generation are considered a gold standard in the industry for strategic decision-making.

Key Details & Use Cases

• Best For: Enterprise-level marketing and PR teams requiring deep, customisable consumer intelligence and robust competitive benchmarking tools.
• Pricing: Pricing is not publicly listed. Access typically requires a demo and is sold via annual contracts rather than self-serve plans.
• Pros: Mature and powerful enterprise workflows, strong brand and competitor benchmarking capabilities, and extensive data coverage.
• Cons: High cost makes it inaccessible for smaller businesses, and the platform has a significant learning curve requiring analyst expertise.

Practical Tip: Leverage Brandwatch's historical data access to benchmark your current share of voice against past campaigns or pre-product launch periods. This provides critical context for your performance and helps you understand the true impact of your marketing activities over the long term.

Website: https://www.brandwatch.com/

The platform is recognised for its powerful reporting capabilities, generating executive-ready dashboards and competitive benchmarking reports that clearly visualise SOV trends. Its strength lies in its ability to unify disparate data sources, making it ideal for PR and communications teams tasked with measuring earned media impact alongside owned and social conversations. Meltwater often includes managed services, providing dedicated support for complex setups.

Key Details & Use Cases

• Best For: Large enterprises and PR agencies requiring a single platform to track share of voice across a vast spectrum of media, including broadcast and print.
• Pricing: Quote-based and customised. Pricing is typically opaque and sits at a premium enterprise level, making it less accessible for smaller businesses.
• Pros: Extremely deep cross-media coverage for a complete SOV picture, and dedicated 24/7 support and success managers for enterprise clients.
• Cons: High cost and quote-based sales process can be a barrier for smaller teams, and the platform can be complex to navigate without dedicated support.

Practical Tip: Leverage Meltwater’s managed services to create custom reports that blend media types. For instance, ask your account manager to build a weighted SOV dashboard that gives higher value to mentions in top-tier national news outlets compared to social media posts.

Website: https://www.meltwater.com/

The platform stands out by bundling competitive benchmarking directly into its core analytics reports, allowing users to compare their performance against others without a separate tool. For deeper SOV analysis, the advanced Listening module unlocks broader data sources and more sophisticated querying. Its transparent, self-serve pricing model and generous 30-day free trial lower the barrier to entry for businesses wanting to test its capabilities before committing.

Key Details & Use Cases

• Best For: Marketing teams and agencies that need a unified platform for social media management and competitive reporting, including SOV.
• Pricing: Offers a 30-day free trial with published pricing tiers. Core plans are priced per user, and the advanced Listening feature is available as an extra add-on.
• Pros: Clear, self-serve pricing removes friction; extensive free trial for testing SOV workflows; also listed on the UK's G-Cloud procurement framework for public sector bodies.
• Cons: The most powerful share of voice features are locked behind the premium Listening add-on, and per-seat pricing can become costly for larger teams.

Practical Tip: During the 30-day trial, fully explore the Premium Analytics and Listening add-on. Set up competitive reports to track your key rivals and test keyword rules to see if the platform provides the depth of SOV data your organisation needs.

Website: https://sproutsocial.com/

The platform’s key advantage is its unified nature, bringing publishing, engagement, and listening into a single dashboard. While the standard listening features are limited, they provide a solid foundation with sentiment analysis and basic SOV views. For businesses requiring deeper competitive intelligence, Hootsuite offers an upgrade path to its Enterprise listening add-on, which unlocks the full power of Talkwalker’s technology. You can learn more about how Talkwalker compares to other enterprise tools in our Talkwalker vs Brandwatch breakdown.

Key Details & Use Cases

• Best For: Marketing teams and agencies that already use Hootsuite for social media management and need a convenient, integrated solution for initial SOV tracking.
• Pricing: Listening features are included in higher-tier Hootsuite plans, with the full enterprise-grade listening available as a costly add-on.
• Pros: Seamlessly combines listening with established social media management tools, and offers a clear upgrade path to powerful, enterprise-level monitoring.
• Cons: The basic listening tier has a very short 7-day data lookback and limited sources. Accessing comprehensive SOV analysis requires a significant investment in the enterprise add-on.

Practical Tip: Use the "Quick Search" feature for rapid, real-time checks on campaign-specific hashtags or breaking industry news. This is perfect for agile marketing teams needing immediate insights without setting up a full, long-term monitoring project.

Website: https://www.hootsuite.com/

The platform excels at providing out-of-the-box competitor benchmarking and SOV dashboards that can be customised for different business units or global regions. Its mature AI generates summaries and alerts, making it easier to manage the vast amount of data collected. For major brands, its crisis alerting and enterprise governance workflows are standout features, ensuring that insights are managed securely and acted upon swiftly by the correct teams. As one of the more advanced AI social listening tools, it is built to handle complexity at scale.

Key Details & Use Cases

• Best For: Large enterprises and global corporations requiring a unified platform for customer experience management, with robust and highly customisable SOV analytics.
• Pricing: Quote-only pricing model involving multi-year enterprise contracts. It is positioned at the premium end of the market.
• Pros: Extremely broad data coverage across 30+ channels, mature AI capabilities for visual listening, and built to scale with robust governance features.
• Cons: High cost and complex implementation make it inaccessible for smaller businesses. The platform has a steep learning curve requiring dedicated user training.

Practical Tip: Leverage Sprinklr's customisable dashboards to create role-specific views. A C-suite executive might only need a high-level SOV trendline, while a product marketing manager would benefit from a dashboard drilling down into competitor feature mentions and sentiment.

Website: https://www.sprinklr.com/

The platform's strength lies in its ability to map conversation drivers to specific audience communities. This allows marketing teams to see which demographics or interest groups are contributing most to their share of voice and their competitors'. Its dashboards visualise SOV alongside sentiment and channel performance, offering a comprehensive competitive view. The integrations are geared towards turning these insights directly into targeted campaigns.

Key Details & Use Cases

• Best For: Enterprise-level organisations and agencies needing to connect share of voice with detailed audience segmentation, especially those with a strong UK/EMEA focus.
• Pricing: No public pricing is available. Access is typically provided via a demo and a custom contract, requiring engagement with their sales team.
• Pros: Powerful audience-first approach, strong EMEA data and service relevance, and excellent integrations for audience activation.
• Cons: Pricing is not transparent, making it less accessible for smaller businesses, and it requires a sales-led onboarding process.

Practical Tip: Leverage Pulsar's audience segmentation to create weighted share of voice models. Instead of treating all mentions equally, you can assign higher value to mentions from your core target communities, giving you a more strategically relevant SOV metric.

Website: https://www.pulsarplatform.com/

The platform’s strength lies in its comprehensive UK-specific datasets and local market expertise. It is designed to inform high-level media planning and budget allocation by providing fast, reliable insights into competitor advertising activity. This makes it an invaluable resource for large-scale campaigns where understanding the traditional media landscape is as crucial as monitoring online conversations.

Key Details & Use Cases

• Best For: Large brands and media agencies in the UK requiring authoritative data on competitor advertising spend and media mix across both traditional and digital channels.
• Pricing: Access is typically enterprise-level and contractual, not offered as a self-service SaaS product. Pricing is bespoke based on data requirements.
• Pros: Highly reputable UK measurement provider with strong local market data; provides fast, actionable insights for strategic media planning and budget allocation.
• Cons: Not a self-service platform, which makes it inaccessible for smaller businesses; focus is on paid advertising rather than organic social listening.

Practical Tip: Leverage Kantar's competitor activity alerts to get real-time notifications when a rival launches a new campaign. This allows your team to react swiftly, whether it's by adjusting your own media spend or preparing a counter-messaging strategy.

Website: https://www.kantarmedia.com/services/advertising-intelligence

The platform stands out due to its trusted, standardised methodology and its recent expansion to include UK CTV ad-spend, providing a more complete picture of cross-platform advertising. Users can delve into competitor creative strategies, placement details, and spending patterns. Its device-level precision for CTV and purchasable datasets in its marketplace offer granular insights for deep competitive analysis.

Key Details & Use Cases

• Best For: Enterprise-level organisations and large agencies needing authoritative, spend-based share of voice data for strategic media planning and competitive intelligence.
• Pricing: Access is quote-based and tailored to enterprise needs, reflecting its comprehensive dataset and analytical capabilities.
• Pros: Trusted global methodology with strong UK market coverage, cross-media tracking, and the option to purchase specific Share of Voice datasets when available.
• Cons: Enterprise-level pricing makes it inaccessible for smaller businesses, and some marketplace datasets may be US-only, requiring confirmation of UK scope.

Practical Tip: When briefing your Nielsen representative, be extremely specific about the competitors, channels, and timeframes you need. This ensures the data you receive is tightly focused, preventing you from paying for irrelevant information and making your share of voice analysis more actionable.

Website: https://www.nielsen.com/

The platform allows you to see the top "SERP Players" for any given keyword, revealing who is winning the visibility battle. By analysing this traffic share data over time, marketing teams can spot strategic wins, identify competitor vulnerabilities, and make data-driven decisions about their SEO and PPC budgets. It provides a clear, numerical answer to the question, "How much of the relevant search audience are we actually reaching compared to our rivals?"

Key Details & Use Cases

• Best For: SEO and PPC managers, digital marketing teams, and competitive intelligence analysts focused on measuring SOV within search engine results pages.
• Pricing: Pricing is not publicly listed and is typically geared towards enterprise-level contracts. You must contact their sales team for a custom quote.
• Pros: Excellent for a competitive lens on paid and organic search channels, providing actionable data to inform SEM and SEO keyword strategy.
• Cons: Primarily focused on search traffic SOV, not social or PR mentions. Enterprise-oriented pricing and contracts can be a barrier for smaller businesses.

Practical Tip: Use the keyword list analysis feature to upload a batch of your most important commercial keywords. This will generate a report showing your overall traffic share across that entire keyword set, giving you a high-level SOV benchmark for your core market.

Website: https://www.similarweb.com/

The tool excels at drilling down into specifics, such as local UK tracking, which weights keyword visibility by regional search volume. This allows businesses to understand their market penetration on a granular level. Semrush's focus on search means it translates a traditionally broad marketing metric into a tangible, data-driven KPI for SEO and PPC professionals, complete with robust reporting and historical trend analysis.

Key Details & Use Cases

• Best For: Marketing teams and SEO specialists focused on quantifying their search engine real estate and outranking competitors for high-value keywords.
• Pricing: The Share of Voice metric is typically included in higher-tier plans (Guru or Business). A free trial is available.
• Pros: Offers a straightforward, widely recognised SOV formula tied directly to keyword performance and search volume. Backed by extensive educational content and setup guides.
• Cons: SOV features are gated behind expensive subscription tiers. The measurement is narrowly focused on search and doesn't account for social media or PR mentions.

Practical Tip: Integrate Semrush's Position Tracking with your Google Analytics and Google Search Console. This creates a powerful feedback loop, allowing you to see how your calculated share of voice correlates with actual organic traffic, clicks, and conversions, proving the direct business impact of your SEO efforts. For a broader view, it is useful to learn more about a complete social media competitive analysis.

Website: https://www.semrush.com/

Top 12 Share of Voice Tools Comparison

Product	Core features	Quality ★	Price & value 💰	Target audience 👥	Unique selling points ✨
🏆 ForumScout	Hourly scans across forums & major socials; natural‑language AI filters; sentiment & Plutchik emotion; SOV & influencer ID	★★★★☆	Growth $19 / Business $49 / Enterprise $129; 7‑day free trial — very cost‑effective	Startups, SMBs, marketing & community teams	Plain‑English AI filters + match scoring; affordable, scalable, Google Sheets/webhook integrations ✨
Brandwatch	Enterprise listening, SOV & competitor benchmarking, dashboards	★★★★☆	Quote‑only; enterprise budgets 💰	PR, enterprise comms, agencies	Mature workflows & reporting; strong EMEA adoption ✨
Meltwater	Cross‑media monitoring (news, broadcast, social), executive dashboards, managed services	★★★★☆	Quote‑only; higher cost for small teams 💰	PR teams, enterprises, media owners	Deep cross‑media SOV and dedicated success managers ✨
Sprout Social	Publishing, engagement & analytics + optional listening add‑on for SOV	★★★☆☆	Published per‑seat pricing; listening is extra 💰	Social teams, SMBs, agencies	All‑in‑one management platform with self‑serve pricing ✨
Hootsuite (Talkwalker)	Quick Search (7‑day), sentiment & basic SOV; Talkwalker add‑on for enterprise listening	★★★☆☆	Tiered plans; basic lookback; add‑on for depth 💰	Social teams needing scheduling + basic listening	Easy entry with upgrade path to Talkwalker coverage ✨
Sprinklr	Real‑time listening (30+ channels), visual detection, SOV & crisis workflows	★★★★★	Quote‑only; enterprise contracts 💰	Large enterprises, CX & crisis teams	Broad data coverage, visual listening, enterprise governance ✨
Pulsar Platform (TRAC)	Multi‑source listening, audience segmentation, SOV & audience dashboards	★★★★☆	Sales‑led pricing; demo & contract 💰	Brands/agencies in UK/EMEA	Audience‑first segmentation and activation integrations ✨
Kantar Media – Advertising Intelligence	SOV & spend benchmarking across TV/print/radio/digital; ad activity alerts	★★★★☆	Contracted enterprise service 💰	Media planners, agencies, brands	Local UK panels and ad spend benchmarking for media planning ✨
Nielsen Ad Intel	Cross‑media spend tracking (linear TV, CTV, digital), creative & placement insights	★★★★☆	Enterprise pricing; purchasable datasets 💰	Advertisers, agencies needing spend accuracy	Trusted methodology with CTV/device precision ✨
Similarweb	Paid & organic search SOV; traffic & domain/keyword share analysis	★★★★☆	Enterprise/tiered plans; quote options 💰	SEO/SEM teams, digital marketers	Strong search/traffic SOV lens and SERP competitor analysis ✨
Semrush	Position Tracking SOV, local keyword visibility, AI visibility toolkits	★★★★☆	Tiered SaaS; SOV features on higher plans 💰	SEO/SEM teams, agencies, freelancers	Widely adopted SEO SOV tool with educational resources ✨

The central takeaway is that share of voice is not a static number; it is a dynamic indicator of your brand's health, influence, and competitive standing. Effective share of voice measurement moves beyond simply counting mentions. It requires a nuanced approach that considers the weight of different channels, the reach of individual mentions, and the sentiment driving the conversation. This strategic analysis transforms raw data into a powerful tool for refining marketing campaigns, identifying product gaps, and anticipating market shifts.

• Select Your Toolkit: Your choice of tool should align directly with your objectives and budget. If you are focused on organic search and paid media, platforms like Semrush or Kantar Media are ideal. For a comprehensive view of social and forum conversations, solutions like ForumScout or Sprout Social provide the necessary depth. Start with a clear list of "must-have" features before committing.
• Establish a Baseline: Your first set of SOV calculations is your benchmark. Don't be discouraged if the numbers are lower than you hoped. This initial data is the foundation upon which you will build and measure all future growth and strategic pivots.
• Integrate SOV with Other KPIs: Share of voice provides the "what," but it doesn't always explain the "why." To gain a holistic view, you must connect your SOV data with other key business metrics. For instance, while share of voice is crucial for market presence, a complete understanding of your market position also requires focusing on customer satisfaction. You can find a complete guide on how to measure customer experience to complement your SOV insights.
• Act and Iterate: Use your findings to inform strategy. A competitor's high SOV on a specific forum might reveal an untapped community. A surge in negative sentiment could signal a need for urgent product feedback. Track your SOV over time to validate your marketing efforts and adjust your course as needed.

Ultimately, mastering share of voice measurement is about transforming your brand from a passive participant into a strategic leader in your industry's conversation. It's about listening intently, understanding the competitive landscape, and using that intelligence to claim your rightful place in the market.

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Ready to uncover conversations you're currently missing? ForumScout is designed to automate the most challenging parts of share of voice measurement, monitoring thousands of forums and online communities to deliver the insights you need. Start your free trial today and see what your customers and competitors are really saying.