Share of Voice: Benchmarking PR Coverage in Singapore

A press release can land sixty pickups and still lose the one contest that decides the outcome: whose version of the story a journalist, an analyst or an AI answer engine reaches for next. Pickup counts answer "did anyone publish this." They say almost nothing about whether a brand is becoming the default source on a topic, or quietly fading from the conversation while a competitor’s name keeps turning up instead.

That gap is exactly where share of voice sits. It is not a new idea in public relations, but a fresh industry survey suggests most Singapore teams are still under-using it, even as they ask harder questions about what their coverage is actually delivering.

What Share of Voice Actually Measures

Share of voice tracks what portion of the conversation in a given category or topic belongs to one brand, measured against the mentions earned by named competitors across the same set of outlets, channels or search results. A PR team pulls total mentions for its own brand and for a defined competitor set over a fixed period, then expresses its own total as a percentage of the combined figure.

Why Pickup Counts Don’t Tell the Whole Story

Muck Rack’s 2025 State of PR Measurement survey, fielded among more than eight hundred communications professionals, found that 86 percent of teams still use the number of stories placed as a core metric, and most rate it as reasonably accurate. That is not surprising. It is easy to count and easy to report upward.

Share of voice tells a different story because it is relative rather than absolute. A brand can double its own placements year on year and still be losing ground if competitors are growing their coverage faster. The same survey found only 41 percent of respondents currently track share of voice at all, despite more than half saying their biggest measurement challenge is connecting PR results to business goals. A metric built specifically to show competitive position against a category is sitting unused in most teams’ reporting.

For a Singapore brand issuing press releases into a crowded sector, such as fintech, property or F&B, the practical question is rarely "did we get covered." It is "did we get covered more, or more prominently, than the three or four companies a customer or investor would naturally compare us against." Share of voice is the metric built to answer that question directly, and it is the one our guide to measuring press release ROI stopped short of covering in detail.

How to Calculate Share of Voice for a Press Release Campaign

The mechanics are straightforward once the inputs are defined properly, and getting the inputs right counts for more than the arithmetic itself:

• Define the category or topic precisely, such as "digital payments Singapore" instead of the broader "fintech," so the mention count reflects a genuine comparison set.
• Choose a fixed competitor list of three to six named brands and keep it stable across reporting periods, so period-on-period comparisons mean something.
• Decide which channels count: traditional media, trade press, broadcast transcripts, social platforms, and increasingly AI-generated answers, since each produces a different picture.
• Pull mention counts for the brand and every competitor across the same window and the same channel set, then divide the brand’s count by the combined total.

Most mid-sized monitoring platforms can automate this tracking once the category and competitor set are configured, though a smaller team can approximate it manually for a single campaign using a media monitoring dashboard’s built-in filters.

Reading the Metric Alongside Sentiment

A rising percentage on its own can mislead, which is why it works best paired with sentiment. PR News’s explainer on the metric makes the point plainly: a brand in the middle of a public controversy can lead its category in mentions for entirely the wrong reasons, so volume without context is not progress. The Muck Rack survey found 43 percent of teams already track sentiment, though only around a quarter consider their sentiment data reliable, and the combination still tells a sharper story than either figure alone. A campaign that grows its share from 18 percent to 27 percent while sentiment holds steady or improves is a genuinely strong result, while the same growth alongside falling sentiment is a warning sign dressed up as good news, one that a pickup count would never surface on its own.

Building a Simple Benchmarking Habit

Few in-house teams need enterprise monitoring software to start. A workable habit can run on a spreadsheet and a recurring media search, provided it is kept consistent:

• Lock the competitor set for at least two reporting quarters before revisiting it.
• Log mentions from the same source types every time instead of switching between broad web search and curated media lists.
• Tag each mention’s tone at a basic positive, neutral or negative level, even without dedicated sentiment software.
• Note which specific messages or product names actually appeared in coverage, not just that a mention occurred.
• Review the trend line quarterly instead of reacting to any single release’s result.
• Flag sharp swings in either direction for a closer read before reporting them upward.

None of this requires sophisticated tooling to begin. It requires discipline about keeping the comparison set and the time window stable, because a benchmark that keeps moving its own goalposts stops being a benchmark at all.

Where This Fits Into Your Reporting

The metric earns its place as one line in a wider report, not a replacement for pickup counts, reach or engagement. A communications lead who can show a steady climb in category standing, read alongside tone and message pull-through, has a far stronger answer for a CEO or client asking what a quarter of press activity achieved than a pickup tally ever provides on its own.

Singapore’s press and AI-visibility landscape rewards brands that show up consistently on a topic; a single strong release followed by months of silence tends to lose ground to competitors who stay in the conversation. Tracking standing against named competitors, even with a simple spreadsheet, turns that consistency into a number a leadership team can actually follow over time.

Building that habit takes a method, not a large budget, and a press release written and distributed with this kind of ongoing benchmarking in mind tends to perform better against it from the outset. If your team wants a second opinion on your current reporting approach or your next distribution plan, feel free to get in touch with PressRelease.com.sg.