iTunes reviews are important to many podcasters. They help not only to increase our exposure in the iTunes directory, they can also give us insight into how listeners are feeling about our shows. It’s a good idea to take a look at your iTunes reviews on a regular basis. However, Apple doesn’t make it easy because iTunes reviews are divided by country, based on an individual reviewer’s location. The only way to see all of your iTunes reviews would be to log into iTunes and then manually change your location to each country, going thru the entire list one by one. That’d be a long and tedious process.

Reveiwcast is a simple service (currently in beta) that you can use to have your show’s last 25 iTunes reviews e-mailed to you for free. It’s easy to use and works pretty well.

When you load the Reviewcast site, you’re greeted with the message, “Let us email you the last 25 reviews from all over the world for any iOS Application, OS X Application, Podcast or iBook listed on the the App Store or iTunes Store.”

Enter your show’s title into the field immediately under the greeting text. Select “Podcast” from the drop-down menu and click the Search button.

Once Reviewcast finds your show’s listing in the iTunes Store, it’ll ask you to enter your e-mail address. Fill out the e-mail field and click the “Send Me Reviews” button.

The next screen displays a message that says the Reviewcast “cogs are now turning.”

As well as:

“Your request for the last 25 reviews of for ‘(your show title here)’ has been submitted and will be processed shortly. Your reviews will be emailed to you from reviews@reviewcast.io so please make sure that address has been white listed in your spam filter. Thanks for using Reviewcast. I hope you have a very lovely day.”

Each time I’ve used Reviewcast, my reviews have shown up within about five minutes of requesting them. Reviewcast e-mails start with, “Thank you for using Reviewcast The reviews you requested are below.” From there, it’ll tell you how many reviews were found and show you the usernames and full texts of each review. And while I get that my podcast isn’t exactly killing it in terms of reviews, I could do without the snarky tone of the e-mail:

I wonder what Reviewcast says if you’ve had more than say, ten reviews? “Not bad!” perhaps. If you have over twenty reviews does it reward you with a hearty “Good job!”? At the rate things are going for my show, it’ll be awhile before I find out. Anyway, if you’ve been wondering what people are saying about your show on iTunes, give Reviewcast a try.

Posted by Shawn Thorpe