With paid social ads, you can see metrics

bajadas864@huiz

Such as ad frequency, reach, impressions, and estimated audience size, but there’s no way to compare them to the competition. That makes it impossible to create any viable paid social SOV tracking. Luckily, organic social SOV measurements are quite straightforward. It’s all about keeping track of all your and your competitors’ brand mentions. While there are plenty of social media monitoring tools for this, I only have experience with Brand24. However, the concept should work across the board. You monitor keywords (brand names) across selected social media channels, and the tool shows you the number of mentions over a specific period. If it doesn’t show SOV, just compare your brand mentions to the overall market mentions.


The following screenshot shows how that might look. In this case, we’re filtering for mentions Special Data of Ahrefs on Twitter. To get SOV, you’d just divide our brand mentions by the overall number of brand mentions in the category. So, if you see overall 500 mentions of three brands that you’re tracking, and 133 of those mentions belong to your brand, your SOV is 26.6%: 11 brand24 social media I’m not leaving this without a “but,” though. As you know, social media is rife with bots, so keep in mind that quite a lot of brand mentions won’t be coming from a real person. To correct for that, you’ll have to adjust the monitoring by applying some filters based on what your social monitoring platform offers. How to measure SOV for mass media channels I’m sure you get the gist now. We can go on and on in terms of marketing channels, so I’ll just end this with mass marketing channels that gave birth to SOV.




The essential mass media metric for channels like TV or radio is Gross Rating Points (GRP). Not only is it suitable for measuring SOV, it’s also often used as a pricing unit to quote campaign costs. GRP is calculated by multiplying audience reach by exposure frequency during a specific period. If your ad airs five times with 12% reach and three times with 15% reach, your GRP is 60 + 45 = 105. All serious media houses have and will share the metrics that you need. I wish I could add some personal experience here, but I’ve only run print ads. All I can say is that we predominantly “digital” marketers can learn a lot from looking at the bigger picture.