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Keywords are the terms Octolens searches for on every tracked platform. Specific keywords surface conversations you want to join. Broad ones fill your feeds with noise and use up your monthly quota. You manage every keyword on the Keywords page in the sidebar.
Octolens Keywords page showing a table of tracked keywords with tag, volume, additional filters, and used in feeds columns

The Keywords page lists every keyword you track.

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What to track

Most teams track three kinds of keyword, which match the three tags Octolens assigns:
  • Own Brand: your company and product names, like Octolens. These matter most.
  • Competitor: companies you compete with. You’ll find complaints you can answer, launches worth reacting to, and features customers like. A post asking for “alternatives to [Competitor]” is a buying signal.
  • Industry Term: words your audience uses for the problem you solve, even when they don’t name you. We track social listening, keyword tracking, and social media monitoring. A project management tool might track project planning tool. These keywords surface people asking for recommendations or venting about pain points.
During onboarding, Octolens suggests 4 starter keywords from your company context, usually a mix of the three. You can change them any time.

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Add a keyword

Click + Add keyword on the Keywords page, enter the term, and save.
Add keyword sheet with fields for Keyword, tag, Platforms, Keyword context, Posts must ALSO include, Negative terms, Negative authors, Wildcard negative terms, and Matching criteria

The Add keyword sheet.

When you save, Octolens:
  • Assigns a tag (Own Brand, Competitor, or Industry Term) based on your company context. Change it in the Select tag dropdown or later in Keyword Settings.
  • Pre-fills keyword context, negative terms, and “any of” terms if your keyword is also a common word (Railway, Arc, Modal), so you catch the brand and not the noun. Review these defaults before you rely on them.
  • Matches common variants. For octolens, you also get octolens.com, @octolens, and octolens's.
  • Looks back 7 days on each platform. Backfilled mentions don’t count toward your monthly quota.
To track reviews, paste a Trustpilot, App Store, or Google Play page URL into the keyword input. Octolens asks which keyword to connect it to, and every review on that page lands under that keyword. See Customer reviews.

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Manage keywords

Each row shows the keyword, its tag, a volume sparkline for spotting noisy keywords, the platforms and include/exclude rules applied to it, and the feeds that use it. Use the search bar to find a keyword in a long list. Click Edit or ··· at the end of a row to:
  • Open keyword settings: change the tag, platforms, context, and include/exclude rules. See Keyword Settings.
  • Pause the keyword: stop collecting new mentions while keeping existing ones in your feeds. Use it when you hit your mention limit or a keyword gets noisy.
  • Delete the keyword: remove it and all its mentions. You can’t undo this.
Global keyword settings (top right) sets rules for every keyword at once. See Global settings.

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Tips

  • Be specific. Terms like “open source,” “strategy,” or “software” clutter your feeds and use up your quota.
  • Iterate. No hits after a few hours? Broaden the keyword. Too much noise? Narrow it or add exclusions in Keyword Settings. Expect a couple of rounds.
  • Check common-word defaults. Review the pre-filled context and negative terms. Case-sensitive matching in Keyword Settings also cuts most common-word noise.

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Need more keywords?

Workspace admins can add Flex keywords on any plan from Settings → Plans & Billing. You pay monthly and can add or remove them any time. Your Plans & Billing page shows the current rate.

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Next steps

  • Keyword Settings: platforms, context, and include/exclude rules per keyword, plus global rules
  • Feeds: group mentions across keywords into saved filters