Most PR reports answer the question of how much coverage the client got. Clients, especially the ones who sit in a category with two or three loud rivals, tend to care about a different question: did we get more of the conversation than they did. Share of voice is the measure built for that question, and it is one of the few PR numbers that means the same thing to a communications team and to a board.
It is also easy to calculate badly. The arithmetic takes one line. The decisions around it, which competitors, which sources, which period and whether every mention counts the same, are where the number becomes either useful or misleading.
The calculation
Share of voice is the brand's mentions divided by the mentions of the brand and its competitors together, multiplied by 100. If the client appeared in 30 pieces of coverage in a quarter and three named competitors appeared in 90 between them, the total conversation is 120 pieces and the client's share is 25 percent.
That is the whole formula. It measures visibility relative to rivals, not the quality of the coverage and not its effect. Everything else in this article is about making sure the 30 and the 90 were counted the same way, because a share of voice figure is only as good as the consistency of its inputs.
Choosing the competitor set
The competitor list is the most important decision and the one most often made casually. Agree it with the client, in writing, at the start of the engagement. A set that changes from quarter to quarter produces a number that moves for reasons nobody can explain.
- Keep it small. Three to five named competitors is usually enough to describe a category without turning the count into a research project.
- Pick the rivals the client actually compares itself with, not the largest names in the sector. A regional brand measured against a global one learns very little.
- Decide how to treat parent companies, sub-brands and spokespeople. Does a mention of a competitor's chief executive count as a mention of the competitor? Choose once and record it.
- Leave room for a newcomer, but add them deliberately, restate the previous periods if you can, and note the change in the report.
Choosing the sources
The second decision is where you count. Share of voice across all online news is a different number from share of voice in the outlets the client's customers actually read, and a different number again once social mentions are included. None of these is wrong, but mixing them is.
In the Gulf, language matters as much as outlet. A brand that dominates English-language business coverage can be almost absent in Arabic media, and a single blended figure hides that completely. Where the client's audience reads both, report English and Arabic separately as well as together. The split is often the most useful finding in the report.
Write the source list down: which publications, which media types, which languages, and which date range. The next person to run the count, or the client's own team checking your work, should be able to reproduce it.
Weighting by tier
A raw count treats a feature in a national business title the same as a line in a round-up on a small site. Clients know those are not equal, and a share of voice that ignores the difference can flatter a competitor that simply issues more press releases.
Weighting by outlet tier fixes most of this. Give each tier a weight, multiply each mention by its tier's weight, and calculate the share from the weighted totals rather than the raw ones. The weights are an agency decision, not a fact, so keep them simple, keep them the same every period and state them in the report.
As a worked example, with Tier 1 weighted at 3, Tier 2 at 2 and Tier 3 at 1: the client has 6 Tier 1, 10 Tier 2 and 14 Tier 3 pieces, a weighted score of 52. The competitors together have 10 Tier 1, 30 Tier 2 and 50 Tier 3, a weighted score of 140. The raw share was 25 percent. The weighted share is 52 out of 192, or about 27 percent, because more of the client's coverage landed in the outlets that matter.
Some agencies also weight by sentiment or prominence, counting a negative piece at zero or a passing mention at half. That can be sensible, but every extra weight is another judgement the client has to trust. Add them only if the client has asked what they would show, and never change them halfway through a year.
Share of voice is a comparison, so its first duty is to be comparable. A method that changes each quarter turns a trend line into noise.
What share of voice cannot tell you
Be plain about the limits, because the client will find them eventually and it is better that they hear them from you.
- It is relative. A client's share can rise in a month when their own coverage fell, simply because a competitor went quiet.
- It says nothing about sentiment on its own. A crisis can produce an excellent share of voice.
- It depends on the sources. Anything outside the agreed list, including print and broadcast you did not capture, is invisible to it.
- It does not prove effect. Like every coverage measure, it can sit beside branded search or enquiries on the same timeline, but correlation is all it can claim.
Reporting it well
Show the figure as a trend over several periods rather than a single month, with the competitor set, sources and weights stated underneath. Show the raw and weighted versions side by side so the client can see what the weighting did. Where one competitor spiked, say why if you know: a product launch, a results announcement, a story that went badly for them.
The client's own coverage is the easy half of the count, provided it has been logged consistently. In Wiro, each piece in a client's Coverage Book carries its publication, tier, language and date, which makes the client's side of the calculation a matter of filtering rather than rebuilding. The competitor side still has to be counted with the same rules, and those rules are worth more than any tool.
