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  "description": "We tried hand rolling social listening before moving to Octolens",
  "path": "/octolens",
  "publishedAt": "2026-04-28T00:00:00.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:a2rdzfdxkjwerrfrpbwcipb2/site.standard.publication/3jd443afc2222",
  "textContent": "Apparently SaaS is dead, and on\npaper we should probably be broadcasting that narrative (\"roll your own SaaS on\nVal Town!\") until the cows come home. But sometimes, paying for a\ndoes-one-thing-well tool like Octolens makes more sense. Val Town complements\nsuch tools rather than replacing them.\n\nOctolens is a \"social listening\" tool for tracking\nmentions of your company across the web: LinkedIn, Twitter, Bluesky, Reddit,\nHacker News, GitHub, YouTube, TikTok, et cetera. Basically, you get notified\nwhen anyone on the internet types out your company keyword(s), whether an\nexcited superfan on Reddit or a LinkedIn thought leader or a cold Hacker News\ncommenter.\n\nHand rolled mentions\n\nBefore using Octolens at Val Town, we relied on hand-rolled social listening\nvals for each platform. One for\nTwitter,\nHacker News,\nGitHub,\nReddit,\nBluesky, and on and on.\n\n\n\nThat works ok, especially if you only really care about one or two social\nplatforms, and you can remix those vals to build your own specialized listening.\nBut it wasn't trivial to capture all mentions and keep up with maintenance.\nKeeping up with changes to Twitter's API, for example, was classic Whac-A-Mole:\ntheir API became very expensive, so we paid for it and became a sort of proxy\nreseller to customers, then when they stopped supporting that we used started\nusing scrapers, which of course Twitter blocked next.\n\nWe switched to Octolens, plus our own custom val, and it has been a useful\nset-it-and-forget-it tool for us.\n\nOctolens webhooks\n\nOctolens as a standalone product has email and Slack alerts for your mentions.\nAnd for doing something bespoke, they have webhooks. Nowadays we have an\nOctolens alert set up that sends a webhook for every Val Town mention to our\noctolens val, which forwards to\nDiscord.\n\n\n\nOur configured Octolens webhook URL contains a query string like\n stored in Val Town as an environment variable so that\nwe know requests to the val are actually from Octolens.\n\n\n\nYou can remix that val if Discord is where you want to see mentions, or you can\ndo something else: enrich customer leads via Clay or RB2B, add them to your CRM,\ncreate a custom testimonial wall, or\nstore in PostHog. Social\nlistening can be for finding customer leads, shining a light on dark bug\nreports, or just pure vanity.\n\nTo get started, sign up at octolens.com and follow our\ndocs guide.",
  "title": "Your ears are burning—listen in with Octolens and Val Town"
}