If you’ve tried mPACT Pro™, you probably know how you can use the service to identify leading voices talking about your market, area of interest, company or brand. You probably also know that mPACT Pro works as a media monitoring solution, tracking articles in mainstream media, blogs and across the spectrum of social media.  But did you know that you can also use mPACT Pro™ to track your competition?

If you’re a brand manager, marketing pro or in the PR discipline, you’re probably measuring your company’s performance against competitors. You want to know if they’re getting more or less coverage than your company/brand. You want to know who is covering them and not covering you – or vice versa. You want to see what they’re doing that’s working, and what’s not. Whether you’re looking for ideas and best practices or just need to satisfy your C-level exec’s competitive urges, understanding the broader market’s coverage of your competitors is important.

mPACT Pro™ makes it easy to do this with the Share of Voice Report. This report makes use of the “competitor” filters you can (optionally) configure when you set up your mPACT Pro™ search (if you didn’t do this the first time around, no problem, you can always go back and update your search settings, for whatever reason – you’re always in control). When you configure an mPACT search, you are actually providing us with three sets of (related) keywords that we use to analyze our billion-plus record database:

• First, a broader set of keywords that define your general topical area, industry or area of interest. We use these keywords to identify all of the voices talking about your topic, whether or not they are specifically talking about your brand. These keywords are used to give you a baseline list of voices (and their articles/blogs/posts) that are potential channels for your message – in other words, people you can focus your outreach on because they talk about your industry in general.
• Second, a more specific set of filter keywords related to your company/brand/products. This is where you can hone in on the voices who are not only talking about your industry/topic, they are already talking about your brand/products/company.
• Finally, one or more sets of filter keywords that define your competition. mPACT Pro™ uses these keywords the same way it uses the keywords that define your own company. In other words, this filter lets you see voices and find articles/blogs/posts covering your topic and specifically mentioning your competition.

This last set of keywords, as you’ve probably already figured out, are what drives mPACT Pro™’s competitor analysis in the Share of Voice Report.

Share of Voice uses all of these filters to present three sets of data: first, the overall coverage of your topic/industry, based on your keywords and the related themes we identify when we analyze our database; second, the specific coverage your company/brand receives; and third, the specific coverage your competitors receive.

We designed the Share of Voice Report to present this data in a very easy to understand graphical format, breaking down the coverage between mainstream pubs (articles), blogs and social media and showing in a bar graph (show below) both the company and competitor filters as a percentage of the total topical coverage discovered by mPACT Pro™, as shown below. The report also provides a table format with the raw numbers of articles/blogs/posts. In both the graph and the table the “All” category represents all of the content discussing your overall topic, while your company/competitors will be labeled with whatever labels you chose when you set up your mPACT search. The share of voice calculation is pretty simple: the “All” category represents 100% of the coverage, and your company/competitor filters are represented as a share of that overall coverage – so if there are 10,000 articles in all and 1,000 mention your company’s keywords, mPACT Pro will provide a 10% share of voice score.

If you expand the filter section directly above the reports, you can customize what is displayed in the Share of Voice report. Using these filters you can:

• Choose which competitors you wish to display
• Choose to display results only from specific lists (like a list of your ten most important voices) that you’ve created in mPACT Pro™ (a blog post on our Lists functionality is coming soon, if you’re not familiar with using them), or to exclude certain lists from your results (for example, you may wish to create a list of your internal blogs and social media accounts so you don’t skew results by looking at your own content).
• Choose which media types to display: all types, articles, blogs or social media
• Choose a time frame to display

Like all mPACT Pro™ reports, you can export any view in the Share of Voice report as a PDF or Excel file, to incorporate it in your internal or external client reporting.  With the time frame filter, for example, you can create weekly or monthly views and show a trend line for your improving coverage!

If you have any questions, please contact us, we’d be glad to give you some one-on-one help with this report or, for that matter, with any report in mPACT Pro. And if you haven’t tried mPACT Pro in a while, just let us know if you’d like a new trial!

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