Think of your market as a packed auditorium. Share of voice is a simple measure of how much of the conversation you actually own compared to your competitors. For a founder, this isn't just another metric to track—it's a strategic weapon.
What Is Share of Voice and Why Founders Should Care
Let's cut through the jargon. As a founder, you're in a constant battle for attention, often against bigger, better-funded rivals. Share of Voice (SOV) is your scorecard in that fight. It tells you, in plain English, whether people are talking about you, them, or the problems you solve.
This goes way beyond simple brand mentions. A true understanding of share of voice marketing means mapping out the entire conversation landscape. It helps you see where you stand, spot opportunities to punch above your weight, and get to product-market fit faster by listening to what real customers are saying.
From Vanity Metric to Strategic Weapon
A lot of early-stage founders write off SOV as a "big brand" metric, getting hyper-focused on immediate conversion numbers instead. That’s a huge mistake. Obsessing over share of voice is one of the smartest things you can do because it's a powerful predictor of future growth.
Think of it this way: Market share is a lagging indicator—it tells you what already happened. Share of Voice is a leading indicator—it tells you what’s likely to happen next. If you can consistently own more of the conversation today, you will own more of the market tomorrow.
The data backs this up. For every 10% boost in share of voice over your current market share, brands typically see a 0.5% gain in actual sales. This powerful link, detailed in a report by Talkwalker, proves that building buzz directly fuels the bottom line. It’s what makes SOV a C-suite conversation, not just a marketing one.
The Founder’s Edge in Share of Voice
Startups have a natural advantage: agility. You can pivot based on what the market is saying in a way that big corporations can only dream of. Tracking SOV gives you the intelligence to make those pivots count.
For startups, focusing on Share of Voice isn't just about brand building; it's about survival and smart growth. It translates abstract "buzz" into tangible business advantages that can help you outmaneuver the competition.
Why Share of Voice Is Critical for Startups
| Benefit | Impact for a Founder |
|---|---|
| Competitive Intelligence | See exactly where your competitors are winning conversations and, more importantly, where their blind spots are. This is a key part of any good competitor analysis strategy. |
| Product-Market Fit Validation | Are people discussing the problems you solve without mentioning your product? That’s a massive opportunity to jump into an existing, high-intent conversation. |
| Uncover Hidden Channels | Discover where your ideal customers actually hang out. Is it a specific subreddit, a niche forum, or a particular influencer's Twitter feed? SOV data points you right to them. |
| Early Warning System | Notice a sudden spike in a competitor's SOV? They might have just launched a new feature or a big campaign. This gives you a chance to react quickly instead of being blindsided weeks later. |
Ultimately, share of voice gives you a real-time map of your industry's battlefield, showing you where to attack, where to defend, and where to find unguarded territory.
How We Measure Share of Voice at BillyBuzz
You don't need a massive budget or enterprise software. At BillyBuzz, we’re a startup, and our whole process is built for small teams that need actionable data, not noise.
It all boils down to one simple formula.
The heart of our share of voice marketing measurement is this:
(Your Brand Mentions ÷ Total Market Mentions) x 100 = Your Share of Voice %
That’s it. The real work is finding the right numbers. I’ll walk you through exactly how we get it done.
This simple loop is how we think about the entire process. It's a constant cycle of listening to what people are saying, measuring where we stand, and then taking smart actions to grow our slice of the pie.
This approach turns measurement from a boring reporting task into an active growth engine.
Defining Your Market Conversation
First, you have to define your market. For us, the market isn't every conversation online. It’s the specific discussions where our ideal customers hang out and our true competitors show up.
We zero in on channels that matter for early-stage B2B SaaS. We get specific.
- Key Subreddits: We live in r/SaaS, r/startups, r/marketing, and r/productmanagement.
- Key Competitors: We track 2-3 direct competitors at a similar stage. Don't compare yourself to Salesforce if you’re a seed-stage startup.
- Problem & Solution Keywords: We monitor terms like "Reddit monitoring tool," "find customers on Reddit," and any mention of our competitors near these phrases.
This tight focus makes "Total Market Mentions" a manageable and meaningful number. You’re not trying to boil the ocean; you’re trying to win your pond.
Our Scrappy Data Gathering Toolkit
With our market defined, it’s time to gather data. We use free tools and a simple spreadsheet to log everything weekly. This cadence is fast enough to spot trends but not so frequent it becomes a chore.
Our process uses these free tools to find every mention:
- Google Alerts: We have alerts for "BillyBuzz," our competitors' names, and our core "problem" keywords. This is our first line of defense for blogs and news.
- Reddit Search: We manually search our target subreddits weekly using operators like
("competitor A" OR "competitor B")to find comparison threads. - Twitter Search: We use Twitter's advanced search to find mentions of our brand, competitors, and keywords within specific date ranges to avoid double-counting.
It's also worth getting a handle on how to measure social media engagement, because not all mentions are created equal. A mention with high engagement carries more weight and gives you a more nuanced view of your SOV.
The Tracking Spreadsheet
All this data goes into a basic Google Sheet. It’s not fancy, but it runs our entire SOV program.
Here’s a snapshot of our tracker:
| Week of | Your Mentions | Competitor A Mentions | Competitor B Mentions | Total Market Mentions | Your SOV % |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 7 | 12 | 18 | 25 | 55 | 21.8% |
| Oct 14 | 18 | 15 | 22 | 55 | 32.7% |
| Oct 21 | 25 | 17 | 20 | 62 | 40.3% |
Each week, we tally the mentions and plug them in. "Total Market Mentions" is simply the sum of our mentions plus our competitors'. This system is fast, accessible, and gives our small team actionable insights.
Our Playbook for Winning Conversations on Reddit
Measuring SOV is one thing; growing it is where the work begins. For us, Reddit is the most important place for both intelligence and brand building. It’s a living archive of high-intent conversations where customers are literally asking for help.
Our entire share of voice marketing strategy is built on one idea: find the right conversations and add massive, undeniable value. This isn't about spamming links. It's about becoming a trusted resource.
Identifying the Right Battlegrounds
You need to know where to listen. We focus exclusively on subreddits where our ideal customers—other founders, marketers, and product managers—hang out.
Our core monitoring list is tight:
- /r/SaaS
- /r/startups
- /r/productmanagement
- /r/marketing
Sticking to a few high-value communities lets us learn their culture and engage authentically.
Here’s a peek inside our BillyBuzz dashboard where we set up and track alerts for these communities.
This setup means we get instant notifications for our keywords inside our target subreddits, so we never miss a chance to jump into a critical conversation.
Setting Up Smart Alerts with BillyBuzz
Once we know where to look, we figure out what to listen for. We use our own tool, BillyBuzz, to surface high-intent discussions.
Here are the actual alert rules we use inside BillyBuzz:
- Direct Competitor Mentions: An alert for
("Competitor A" OR "Competitor B")fires anytime a rival is mentioned in our target subreddits. - Problem-Aware Keywords: We have an alert for
("how to" OR "find customers" OR "social listening") AND "Reddit". This catches anyone asking for a solution like ours. - "Best Tool for X" Questions: An alert for
("best tool for" OR "alternative to" OR "what are you using for") AND ("monitoring" OR "leads")signals immediate buying intent.
These specific rules mean every alert that hits our Slack is a qualified opportunity to engage.
The goal isn't to find every mention of your industry. It's to find moments where a helpful comment can solve someone's problem—and introduce your brand in the process.
Our Response Templates: Value First, Pitch Later
How you respond is everything. A clumsy, self-promotional comment will get downvoted instantly. We’ve developed a few simple frameworks built on a "value-first" philosophy.
Template 1: The Competitor Comparison
- Goal: Acknowledge the competitor fairly, then introduce your solution as a targeted alternative.
- Response: "Great question. [Competitor A] is a solid tool, especially if you need [specific use case]. A lot of founders also use our tool, BillyBuzz, when they're specifically focused on finding new customers in Reddit communities. The main difference is our AI relevancy scoring, which helps filter out noise. Might be worth a look depending on your exact goal."
Template 2: The "How Do I Solve X?" Post
- Goal: Give a genuinely helpful, detailed answer first. Only mention your tool if it’s a natural fit.
- Response: "I've faced this exact challenge. Here are three things that worked for me: 1. [Actionable Tip 1], 2. [Actionable Tip 2], 3. [Actionable Tip 3]. We actually built a tool to automate step 2, but the manual process I described works great to start."
This approach turns passive monitoring into an active growth engine. By consistently showing up and being helpful, you build authority. It's a fundamental piece of learning how to get customers from Reddit in 2025 and is what turns conversations into real business.
Scrappy Strategies to Increase Your Share of Voice
You don’t need a massive budget to start owning the conversation. Your real advantage isn't cash—it's speed and cleverness. Growing your share of voice marketing footprint means running a smarter, more targeted playbook than your bigger competitors.
Here at BillyBuzz, we lean into a few high-ROI, cost-effective tactics that any small team can pull off. It's about being surgical—finding the perfect moment to join a conversation and delivering value.
Create Content for the Problem Aware
Forget writing another generic "ultimate guide." Your time is better spent creating content that answers hyper-specific questions your audience is already asking. We use our Reddit monitoring to find "problem-aware" keywords that signal high intent but have low competition.
For instance, instead of targeting "social listening," we'll publish a blog post titled, "How to Find Your First 10 Customers in r/SaaS." This hits a real pain point for our target audience and meets them where they’re looking for solutions.
This approach ensures every piece of content has a built-in audience and a direct path to ranking for terms that drive sign-ups, not just vanity traffic.
Double Down on Proactive Community Engagement
Our Reddit strategy is proactive. We dive into conversations in our key subreddits (r/SaaS, r/startups) the moment BillyBuzz alerts us to a competitor mention or a problem-based keyword.
When we see a competitor get mentioned, our go-to response looks something like this:
"Solid points on [Competitor Name]. We've heard they're great for [specific use case]. For founders focused specifically on tracking high-intent Reddit conversations, we built BillyBuzz to filter out the noise. The main difference is our AI scoring that surfaces actual buying signals."
It's a non-confrontational, value-first approach that positions us as a helpful alternative. This is a low-cost, high-impact way to steal share of voice, one comment at a time.
Leverage Media Mentions with HARO
Getting your brand featured in high-authority publications is one of the quickest ways to boost your SOV. We use services like Help a Reporter Out (HARO) daily. We’ve built response templates for common queries in our niche (marketing, startups, SaaS growth) that let us fire off a relevant pitch to a journalist in under five minutes.
Landing one mention in a major publication can create more brand awareness than a month of social media posts. To get the most mileage from these efforts and make sure your voice is heard across different platforms, it’s worth mastering some effective content repurposing strategies.
Run Targeted, Low-Cost Ads
While we’re huge fans of organic, we aren't afraid to put a tiny ad budget to work. We run low-cost Reddit ads—think $5 to $10 per day—targeted exclusively at our core subreddits. The goal isn't direct conversions; it's to guarantee our brand name shows up inside the most relevant ongoing discussions.
This ensures our brand stays visible when important conversations are happening, supplementing our organic efforts and keeping us top-of-mind.
You can't improve what you don't measure. It's an old saying, but it's the absolute truth when it comes to share of voice marketing. All the theory in the world doesn't matter until you turn raw data into a strategic compass that guides your decisions.
A good dashboard doesn't need to be fancy or complicated. It just needs to be consistent and, most importantly, drive action. For founders and small teams, this means zeroing in on a few core metrics that tell you, at a glance, if you're winning or losing the conversation in your market.
Setting a Cadence: Why We Swear By Weekly Check-ins
We're big believers in a weekly reporting rhythm. In the early stages of a company, the ground shifts fast. A competitor might launch a surprise campaign, or a single Reddit thread about your niche could suddenly blow up.
Checking in weekly keeps you agile. It turns your SOV tracking from a boring historical record into a powerful early-warning system, letting you spot opportunities and threats before they become major problems.
The Essential Metrics to Track
Forget vanity metrics like impressions that don't tell you anything useful. Your first dashboard should be ruthlessly simple, focusing on four numbers that tell a clear story. These are the exact metrics we live by here at BillyBuzz.
- Total Brand Mentions: Your raw count. How many times was your brand mentioned this week across the specific channels you care about?
- SOV % vs. Competitors: Here's the heart of it. This is your brand's slice of the pie—your mentions as a percentage of the total market conversation.
- Sentiment Score: Are people saying good things or bad things? A simple score (+1 for positive, -1 for negative, 0 for neutral) is all you need to start.
- Mention Sources: Where is the action happening? Knowing that 70% of your mentions came from
r/SaaStells you exactly where to double down next week.
Putting this together doesn't require a data science degree. You can learn more about building your own custom dashboards for social media monitoring with simple tools that plug right into your existing workflow.
Your dashboard's main job isn't just to report numbers. It's to force a conversation with your team each week: "What did we do that worked? What did our competitors do? And what's our game plan for next week?"
A Sample SOV Report You Can Use Today
This is all about turning numbers into insights. Here’s a dead-simple template you can build in a spreadsheet to track your progress. That "Weekly Change" column is where the magic happens—it shows momentum and the immediate impact of your work.
Sample Weekly Share of Voice Report
This simple table turns abstract data into a clear competitive snapshot. Use it to track your progress against key rivals and spot trends week over week.
| Metric | Your Brand | Competitor A | Competitor B | Weekly Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total Mentions | 32 | 28 | 45 | +8 from last week |
| SOV % | 29% | 25% | 40% | +5% from last week |
| Sentiment Score | +12 (15 pos, 3 neg) | +8 (12 pos, 4 neg) | +18 (25 pos, 7 neg) | Improved |
| Top Mention Source | r/startups | r/SaaS | Consistent |
A report like this makes the story instantly clear. In this example, your brand saw a great jump in mentions and SOV, backed by strong positive sentiment. The next question for your team is simple: why?
Did a recent blog post take off? Did your new Reddit engagement strategy finally pay off? This dashboard gives you the data you need to start asking the right questions, turning measurement into a tight feedback loop that sharpens every single marketing decision you make.
Common SOV Mistakes Most Founders Make
When we first started tracking share of voice marketing at BillyBuzz, we made every mistake in the book. It’s easy to get lost in data that looks good but doesn’t move your business forward. Let us share our blunders so you can get real value from day one.
Tracking SOV isn't just about watching a number go up. It’s about making smarter decisions. Steering clear of these pitfalls ensures your efforts translate into actual growth.
Mistaking Volume for Value
This is the classic trap: getting fixated on raw mention counts. A huge spike in mentions is meaningless—or even damaging—if the sentiment is terrible. A high mention count with negative context isn't a win; it’s a PR crisis brewing.
Early on, we’d high-five over every mention, ignoring its quality. That was a huge mistake. A single, thoughtful, positive comment on a high-intent Reddit thread is worth a hundred low-engagement brand drops on Twitter. Now, we weigh every mention by its sentiment and source authority.
Defining Your Competitive Set Too Narrowly
It’s natural to zero in on the one or two competitors you see on every G2 comparison page. But your customers don’t live in that bubble. They might be comparing your SaaS tool to a feature buried inside a massive platform, or even just a tricked-out spreadsheet.
We initially only tracked our direct rivals and completely missed the bigger picture. Our competitive set is much broader now:
- Direct Competitors: The obvious ones offering a nearly identical solution.
- Indirect Competitors: Giant platforms that have an overlapping feature.
- "Good Enough" Solutions: Manual processes, workarounds, or DIY setups people use instead of buying a dedicated tool.
This wider view gives us a more honest picture of our actual share of voice.
Ignoring the Broader Problem
Here’s another classic mistake: only tracking your brand name. Your best potential customers probably don't even know you exist yet, but you can bet they're talking about the problems your product was built to solve. We missed out on so many opportunities by failing to monitor these "problem-aware" keywords.
Forgetting this is like going to a party and only listening for your own name instead of jumping into conversations about topics you’re an expert on. This is especially critical now, with voice search becoming more common. Globally, 32% of consumers have used a voice assistant in the past week, a huge signal that people are searching differently. You can discover more about these voice search trends on GWI.com.
A founder’s most critical mistake is failing to act on the insights. SOV data is useless if it just sits in a dashboard. Every week, your report should spark one question: "Based on this, what are we going to do differently next week?"
If a competitor’s SOV suddenly spikes, dig in and find out why. Did they launch a new feature? Get a big press hit? If a new subreddit starts buzzing about your niche, get in there and start engaging. We treat our weekly SOV report not as a summary of the past, but as our battle plan for the future. Don’t let your data gathering become a passive, academic exercise. Turn insight into action.
Common Questions About Share of Voice
Still got questions? We get it. As founders, we've been there. Let's tackle a few common hurdles we see startups run into when they first start digging into share of voice.
"How Can I Track Share of Voice with No Budget?"
You don't need a fat wallet, just elbow grease. Set up free tools like Google Alerts for your brand name and your top competitors.
From there, commit to a weekly manual search of your target subreddits, forums, and social media channels. Log every mention in a simple spreadsheet. Yes, it's manual, but this hands-on approach is priceless. It builds an instinct for the conversation landscape that no automated tool can give you right out of the gate.
"How Often Should a Startup Measure Share of Voice?"
For any early-stage company, we're big believers in weekly tracking. Things move incredibly fast when you're starting out.
A weekly check-in is your early warning system. It helps you spot a competitor's new campaign, catch a rising customer complaint before it blows up, or see the immediate results of a blog post you just shipped. As you grow, you might switch to bi-weekly or monthly, but in the beginning, weekly is your key to staying agile.
"What’s the Difference Between Share of Voice and Market Share?"
This is a big one, and it's a distinction every founder needs to nail down. Think of it this way:
- Share of Voice is your slice of the conversation. It’s a leading indicator—a sign of what’s to come.
- Market Share is your slice of the sales pie. It’s a lagging indicator—a report card on what already happened.
Your goal is to grow your share of the conversation consistently. Decades of data show that when your SOV goes up, your market share almost always follows. You're essentially building future demand by winning the discussion today.
Ready to stop guessing and start winning the conversations that matter? BillyBuzz is the AI-powered Reddit monitoring tool built for founders. We surface high-intent leads and competitor insights directly from the communities you care about, so you can grow your share of voice and your business. Start your free trial today.