Asking for reviews

Reviews used to solely be the rulers of the Theatre, Movies and Restaurants, with the “reviewers” in the newspapers given the credit of expert holding the success of their reviewees in the tip of their pens. In the 90s characters like actor Joey Tribbiani (yes, from Friends) were seen marching the streets of New York at 1 am, desperate to read the review of his play except: “Joey Tribbiani was able to achieve brilliant new levels of…. Sucking!”

These days everyone can review anything. And in the podcast world, those reviews are (currently) vital to the algorithm that helps the new audience find your podcast.

The issue is that to get people to review your podcast you have to ask them to. And that feels weird. It’s not in our nature to demand things for ourselves. It turns out though, you really can be quite demanding before someone will get mad at you! So after 4 months of asking nay BEGGING for reviews, I managed to learn and observe a few things to get it to work better:

1. Don’t Be Afraid To Ask – And Keep Asking

When you work in commercial radio you become accustomed to repeating your message – especially the more sales type ones. The idea being that not everyone is listening all the time to the linear broadcast format, and repetition means your audience remembers what they have heard. As a programmer I often winced at the number of times we would run premium text competitions in one day – but the audience would never fail to take part and the more we said it… the more money we would make (I know, makes you want to puke right?!)

So how often should you ask for reviews?

The answer – every episode. Oh, wait no, that’s not true.

Everyday Positivity is daily, and it usually only runs for up to 2 minutes. We recognised that we needed more reviews to get the Flash Briefing in front of more people. Every day asking for reviews, with a sell that sometimes ran to 60 seconds worth of instructions. The reviews went rocketing up and we started to grow the audience.

Then the inevitable happened:

Through reading the reviews I discovered that the repetition and lengthy way of asking for the reviews was not going down well with the audience:

“This is about 50% positivity and 50% fishing for reviews. Annoying.”

The solution has been to drop to 1 review request every 4 days and to keep it sharp. This means we are getting a steady flow of reviews, and (when I just checked while writing this) the number of irritated reviews has dropped off.

So context matters – if you do a weekly 30-minute podcast, a 1-minute review request is pretty harmless every episode. Every day for 2 minutes – a lighter less frequent review request works better.

2.What’s In It For Them

I have heard some podcasts give random prizes for reviews and I’ve seen articles about how that doesn’t work for the audience. Again I think it depends on your podcast and your audience as to whether this type of incentivisation works.

What is essential is that your “why” should be clear. Communicate your intent. I want everyone to know about Everyday Positivity because I want to help as many people as I can. So I say that when I talk about the reviews. “Leave a review and together we can make the world more positive”

Why should they review your podcast? Are they part of something if they do? What is the impact of their review?

3. Read Some Out

This week I started reading out reviews. It’s the social proof that your listeners need to know that this is what other people do too. They aren’t “weird” for doing it

I recently sampled The Property Podcast who did their review request about two thirds in. In reading the reviews they not only told other listeners that their podcast was great, they also sounded like they were talking to their audience by answering any questions that came up.

Oh and their line which I thought was nice: “Thanks to your reviews, we remain the most popular property podcast”

4. Give a strong call to action

Reviews aren’t easy to do. They may be easy to click through, but your listener is only going to want to go through it if they have absolutely nothing better to do. (See “Why”)

So make it as clear and easy as possible, and from time to time put the directions on how to review in there too.

5. Make It Fun

The Eggchasers Rugby Podcast (highly popular Rugby Podcast) will use their reviews as an opportunity for their listeners to be funny. They read out and encourage the listeners that leave a 5-star review and tongue in cheek joke about how awful the podcast is! This causes fun and hilarity all-round.

I’ve not worked out how to do this for my short form pod yet but I always think about how creative it is and think about how I can make the reviews read more fun.

In Summary

My favourite thing about getting reviews is that you can really hone your podcast. It encourages you to try and so you do a bit, and then get some feedback, and if you use that feedback wisely you can streamline your podcast into a really bright, marvellous programme with a growing active audience.