Every developer knows that app review websites are a native part of the mobile app ecosystem and an essential part of the promotional plan for iPhone or Android apps. There are hundreds of blogs and review sites out there, but not all are the same. Some can really boost your sales figures and push the app to the charts while others still have just a humble following. We have taken seven top-notch app review websites and analyzed what kind of impact they have on the web, especially on creating buzz on social networks.

Here is the list of 7 app review websites you should submit your app to together with the links to submission pages (just make sure you read the submission guidelines first), their Twitter and Facebook pages. And below we’ll compare their impact in terms of number of readers and Twitter and Facebook impact.

	148 Apps	About 148 Apps	RSS feed	@148apps	Facebook	Submit your app
	AppAdvice	About AppAdvice	RSS feed	@AppAdvice	Facebook	Submit your app
	AppSafari	About AppSafari	RSS feed	@AppSafari	Facebook	Submit your app
	TouchArcade	About TouchArcade	RSS feed	@TouchArcade	Facebook	Submit your app
	iPhone Alley	About iPhone Alley	RSS feed	@iPhoneAlley	Facebook	Submit your app
	AppCraver	About AppCraver	RSS feed	@AppCraver	Facebook	Submit your app
	AppStorm	About AppStorm	RSS feed	@iPhoneAppStorm	Facebook	Submit your app

Site traffic

The first thing to consider for each website is its traffic. How many potential users visit the site and have a chance to read the review (and consequently buy the app). Checking the traffic from Google gave the following estimates:

What we can learn from the data:

• TouchArcade, AppAdvice and 148apps have the biggest readership so getting reviewed there has the best outlook in terms of number of views. However, bear in mind that even sites which came last in terms of estimated traffic still have really good traffic numbers so make sure you submitted the app to them, too.

• On average people spend around 4 minutes on these websites per visit (ask yourself how many reviews you can read for that time)

• It is estimated that on average a visitor visits the site two times and each time views two or three (2.64) pages

• In total, one TouchArcade and AppSafari user  on average visits as many as 8 pages in total, while AppStorm and iPhoneAlley users visit only about 3 during the same period of time.

However, the fact that a review site has a lot of readers does not necessarily mean that the review on that site will start buzz about the app on social networks. In order to check this we analyzed the last 20 reviews from all 7 websites in terms of how many shares, retweets and comments they had on Twitter and Facebook.

Number of times app reviews get shared on Twitter

The chart shows number of tweets for the last 20 reviews on these sites (you can see both the highest number of tweets for some review and the the average number of tweets per post).

What we can learn from the data:

• Expect around 15 to 20 tweets from your review, but this number can go much higher

• AppCraver, Touch Arcade and App Storm reviews are most likely to make your app spread around Twitter

• Also (you can’t see this on the chart and I didn’t want to make this 50-chart post) this depends on the type of app, so games have some more chances to be tweeted about

Following on Twitter

• Do bear in mind, however, that this refers to the number of users who share on Twitter and not actual number of people who have seen the tweet on their official account. Looking at the chart bellow reveals that, for example, AppAdvice and iPhoneAlley  have more followers although the number of tweets about these reviews were relatively low – this means that many people might have seen the info about your app (and since they follow these accounts they are interested to hear about your next app, right?), just weren’t feeling like sharing forward (which is not bad per se since they may have gone to App Store instead and installed the app:).

.

Number of times app review gets shared on Facebook

What can we learn from the data:

• These reviews don’t get shared much on Facebook (green column), but when they do it spreads virally (the average number of shares per post is rather low in comparison to the maximum number of shares the most interesting reviews got)

• App review sites in general have more Twitter followers than Facebook fans

• People are more likely to share games on Facebook (just look at the number of shares for TouchArcade

To conclude, if your app gets reviewed at one of these websites you can expect:

• Getting at least 2k potential readers and having a review on a site which gets more than 100k visits each month

• That your app will get in front of several thousand eyes of Twitter users who are interested in new apps and who are likely to download your app

• That only about 10-20 of them will share forward the review because they find it interesting (it would be even more interesting to see how many of them installed the app and then tweeted about it, though)

• That this kind of reviews don’t get shared much on Facebook unless it’s a game, but when it does it has potential to go viral

So, if you still haven’t done it, make sure you submitted you app to these review sites – it’s a must-do for every developer.

If you think that some other app review website (we’ve excluded the big iPhone news websites such as TUAW and MacWorld since they don’t only offer reviews) you think should be added to the analysis feel free to leave a comment.