AP 0759: How Do You Handle Spammy One-Star Reviews in iTunes?

AskPat 759 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 759 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions, five days a week.

All right, now here's today's question from David.

David: Hey Pat, how are you? My name is David DiFranco, from the Ask David podcast. I actually just launched that podcast a few days ago, so it's new to me, however, I do have a few hundred listeners already. Mainly because of my YouTube channel and my social media presence, of which I'm very thankful for. However, there seems to be a handful of people who feel the need to leave one star ratings on iTunes, which definitely annoys me considering how much work I've put into this podcast. My question to you is how do you deal with these one star ratings, especially when you have a good feeling that these people are not even listening to the podcast to begin with? Thanks, and keep up the great work. Appreciate it.

Pat Flynn: Hey David, thank you so much for the question. I really appreciate it. I know exactly how you feel. It's just not cool, right? Just recently on the Smart Passive Income Podcast I've had randomly the comments and the ratings and reviews have been great, and I've been stuck at 21 one star reviews over the last like three years. That hasn't changed for a while. Many of those were random ones, too. Some people were just upset for whatever reason. For those, you kind of just have to get over it and know that that's just going to happen.

Recently, in the last couple days, interestingly enough, I've noticed these random accounts that have weird usernames and haven't commented anywhere else. They're all leaving one sentence, one star reviews. Somebody is going in there and trying to make and wreak havoc. Luckily for an older show like me, there are also nearly 200,000 five star reviews that kind of just null all that negative stuff. When you're just starting out, it can be really, really discouraging, obviously.

You said you have a YouTube channel. I know typically commenters on YouTube are a little bit more aggressive and outspoken and hate is definitely more prominent in the YouTube world, so maybe some of that's carrying over. I have no idea. Oftentimes, if I get one of those spammy troll kind of related comments, first thing I want to do is report them. That's something that you can do through iTunes in the desktop version at least, where you can go into an individual review and actually report it. You can leave a little description along next to it, why that shouldn't be there. You can actually select, I think, “not relevant to the show,” or all those kinds of things. That has over time worked out for me.

Sometimes it won't erase those right away, but there are human beings on the other end at iTunes that will read my comments on other people's comments if I feel that they are kind of unjust. Another thing you can do is if you have a tribe already, or maybe an email list or something, you can go in there and have people also vote “not helpful” for that, or also report those ones as well. That helps capture attention because it kind of alerts, not Google, alerts iTunes that there's something going on here that this comment shouldn't exist. That's one method you could use to hopefully get those erased.

The other thing that I would just say is, don't waste too much time thinking about it. Yeah, it's kind of a bummer and when you're just starting out, people see those one star reviews. I think people are also smart enough to see ones and know that they're not legit. They'll read them and just know that they're not legit. Mark them down in terms of voting “no, it's not helpful,” report them, and share a good reason why that they should be taken down. Then if possible have your tribe come in and do the exact same thing. You'll see that over time they'll probably disappear. Even if they don't, as long as you're providing value, obviously, and you have a great show, people are going to see, generally, that your show is definitely worth the five stars that you hopefully are doing, versus the one star that is obviously people who are just leaving reviews for whatever reason that are bad, just because.

Hopefully that helps out, David, and again, I wouldn't worry and get discouraged too much about it. You've got a lot more people that need you and need you at your full capacity and full motivated self to deliver content for them. Don't let these trolls get you down. Every second you waste on a hater is a second you're taking away from people who actually need you. Just do those quick things and hope for the best. iTunes doesn't always respond right away, so if you still see it there a week, couple weeks later, do the same thing again and just see what happens.

David, thank you so much for the question. I wish you all the best. I also want to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. For those of you listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show as well, just head on over to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page.

Thank you so much, I appreciate you all, and here's a quote to finish off the day and the week by Edwin Land. He said, “An invention that is quickly accepted will turn out to be a rather trivial alteration of something that has already existed.” That was a mouthful. Let me read that again. “An invention that is quickly accepted will turn out to be a rather trivial alteration of something that has already existed.”

Okay, so if something has been quickly accepted, and it's sort of new and inventive, you'll actually see that it's just a new version, a better version, of something that has kind of already existed. Something that is completely brand new is going to take a little bit more time to get in there in the market and be widely accepted. I'm thinking of things like the Segway. That was brand new, and you don't see Segways on the sidewalk unless you're in downtown San Diego or in some touristy area. Everybody thought that was going to change the world and the way we travel.

Anyway, getting off tangent here. Have a great weekend, everybody. Thank you so much. Feel free to leave a review on AskPat since we're talking about reviews today. Hopefully it's five stars, but whatever you feel is an honest review, that'd be awesome. Just head on over to iTunes and leave an honest review for the show. Just look up AskPat in the search bar on iTunes and go from there. Thank you so much, I appreciate you all and I'll see you the next episode of AskPat. Bye!