Promoting App Reviews with Tweets

How to Drive App Reviews, that will Drive AppStore Rankings

So, we can’t know for sure, but it is a pretty good bet that rankings and reviews play heavily into ALL of the AppStores ranking algorithms. This means that the higher percent of good reviews your application has, the better it will rank when people search for your related keywords. That means that driving reviews is an important part of app promotion and AppStore SEO. Here is a great example of Jamie Oliver (or his agency) driving traffic, reviews and downloads for his application with a simple tweet:
(Click on it to make it bigger)

What you can see is that not only is he thanking the people who have already reviewed his application, but he is subtly encouraging more positive reviews. This tweet is also creating a general awareness for the application, and reassuring potential users that many people have found it useful, no-doubt also driving a surge of new downloads. If you believe that social media links can also have a subtle, long-term SEO value, like I do, then this link is also helping the application page get crawled and noticed by the search engines more readily, meaning that this application will rank better in Google searches over the long-run.

Tracking Success for App Tweets

They encode the url in bit.ly, but when you actually take a look at it, it looks like this:

https://market.android.com/details?id=com.zolmo.
twentymm&referrer=utm_source%
3Dtwitter%26utm_medium%3Dtweet%26utm_
campaign%3Djo

You can see that they are using this for tracking, because it include the UTM Source of Dtwitter, with a couple other identifiers that are being pulled in and parsed by their analytics. Zolmo refers to the company that created the application and TwentyMM appears to be the company that they used to create the promotional video that is in the application. Presumably, all of this is feeding into the back-end console that the marketplace is providing the app administrator.

The Android Marketplace and Usability

The one thing that  is not ideal, is that the link goes to the traditional page in the Android Marketplace, which is not ideal for mobile viewing. It would be better if the Android Marketplace had set up user-agent detection and redirection on their traditional page, or if the Twitter link had gone to a mobile formatted page. Some estimates show that as much as 70% of tweets are consumed via mobile phone. If the Android Marketplace pages had user-agent detection and redirection set up, the same link could get a mobile viewer to the mobile page, and a computer user to the traditional page. Users could then write a review or initiate a download to their phone from either page. All in all, though Jamie (or his agency) is doing a good job promoting the app, and it is the Android Marketplace that (as usual) needs to get their act in gear a bit more!