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Octomat Links (Octolinks)

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Octomat Links (Octolinks) is a simple way to create links for your site visitors to follow it in Telegram via Octomat. You can use it to create a button or a link that will open a chat with Octomat and start following your site’s feed.

Octolinks are Telegram links that pass the URL to your website to the Octomat.io bot. If a visitor who clicks the link is not using Octomat yet, they will be offered to add the Bot. Once they enable it, your feed will be added to their list of subscriptions automatically. For existing Octomat users, Octolinks add your feed to their subscriptions with two simple clicks.

Why use Octolinks? There are 2 main advantages:

  1. You don’t need to maintain a dedicated Telegram channel for your website in order to promote your content to the Telegram audience. Just keep updating your site and Octomat will take care of the rest.
  2. Octomat users have more control over how they want to get updates from the websites they follow. They can use Telegram groups to organize their feeds by topic or other criteria, and they can control notification settings.

Pre-requisites #

Octolinks work using Octomat and Octomat relies on a website to have an RSS/Atom feed in order to fetch updates from it. Thus, Octolinks only work for websites that have an RSS/Atom feed.

  1. Copy the RSS/Atom feed URL of the website or page that you want to create an Octolink for. You can also use the URL of the website itself if it has a feed attached to it and if it is discoverable by Octomat (how to check it - just try subscribing to this URL in Octomat yourself first and see if it works).
  2. Open your chat with Octomat bot and send the following command: 
    /link <URL>
    Replace <URL> with the URL you want to create an Octolink for.
  3. Octomat will reply with a link that you can use on your website. It will look like this: 
    https://t.me/OctomatioBot?start=abcDEFG123
  4. Copy this URL and share it with your followers. For example, you could place a “Follow in Telegram” link on your website. Example HTML code below uses Font Awesome icon: 
    <a href="https://t.me/OctomatioBot?start=abcDEFG123" target="_blank" rel="noopener">
    <i class="fab fa-telegram"></i> Follow in Telegram
</a>
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