A Foxtrail is MentionFox's term for thread-level lead extraction. When a scan finds a mention, the Foxtrail feature digs deeper into the surrounding conversation to find additional people who are interested, asking questions, or expressing opinions relevant to your client.
When you view a scan result, you may see a Follow Foxtrail option. Clicking it instructs MentionFox to crawl the full thread surrounding that mention. On Reddit, this means reading all comments in the post. On Quora, this means reading all answers. On forums, this means reading the full discussion thread. MentionFox then extracts every participant who shows relevant engagement.
A single Reddit post titled "What CRM do you use for a small team?" might have 50 comments. Your scan catches the post because it mentions your client's competitor. But the real leads are the 12 commenters who say things like "I've been looking for something simpler" or "we're about to switch." Foxtrails catch these hidden leads that a surface-level scan would miss.
Leads extracted from Foxtrails are stored in the thread_leads table and appear in the client's War Room under the Leads tab. Each Foxtrail lead includes the person's username, their comment text, and the context of the thread. From there, you can enrich the lead to discover their real identity, email, company, and job title, then add them to your outreach pipeline.
Use Foxtrails on high-value threads where multiple people are discussing a topic relevant to your client. Threads about tool recommendations, product comparisons, and industry pain points are the richest sources. Do not bother with Foxtrails on news articles or press releases where comments are mostly reactions rather than buying signals.