Content
Hey, we're Apify. The Apify platform gives you access to over 1,500 data extraction tools and unofficial APIs for popular websites. Check us out.
🔭 How do I use data from Facebook comments?
Facebook Comments Scraper 🔗 is a data extraction tool able to handle any heated Facebook discussion. You can extract the comment text itself, the post it’s attached to, and the number of reactions to each comment. Here’s what you can use all that data for:
😊 Sentiment analysis. Apply natural language processing (NLP) methods to label each extracted comment as positive, negative, or neutral. This can help you understand the overall sentiment of the conversation around a particular topic or brand.
🗣 Topic modeling. Use machine learning algorithms to identify key topics discussed in the comments. This can enable you to find insights into the most important issues and concerns of your target audience.
😤 Customer feedback analysis. Use the comments to gather feedback on your products or services. Combined with sentiment analysis and topic modeling, this can help you identify areas for improvement and make better business decisions.
🧭 Market research. Use comments to gain insights into the preferences and behavior of your target audience. This can help you create more effective marketing campaigns and strategies. Or assess ongoing campaigns – yours or competitor’s.
🕸 Network analysis. Apply graph theory to analyze connections between different users who are commenting on the same post. This could enable you to identify key opinion leaders among your target audience and plan or shift your campaigns accordingly.
🥾 Step-by-step guide to scraping Facebook Comments
Step 1. Go to Facebook Comments Scraper
Visit Apify Store, where you can find over 1,000+ ready-to-use tools that’ll help you get any publicly accessible data from the open web. Search for 'Facebook' there and choose Facebook Comments Scraper 🔗.
Click on Try for free and create an Apify account using your email or GitHub account. No credit card details are required. After you create an account, you’ll be redirected to Apify Console — your workspace for web scraping and automation tools.
Step 2. Select the Facebook post you want to scrape comments from
Now head over to facebook.com and find the post you want to scrape comments from. Copy its URL and paste it into the Facebook URLs field. Let’s see if we can scrape the 50 most recent comments from this Humans of New York post. You can add as many posts as you want, indicate how many comments you want to scrape as well as in which order to extract them.
Facebook URLs fieldStep 3. Click Start ▶️
The crawler will now visit each Facebook post you’ve chosen and extract the newest comments. Once the scraper’s status changes from Running 🏃🏻♀️ to Succeeded 🏁, you’re one step away from downloading your Facebook comments.
Step 4. Download the comments
Click the Export button to view and download your data.
You can Preview 👁 the extracted data as a table, spreadsheet, CSV or JSON file. You can always find it Storage tab and extract it in any format.
🌈 Need more Facebook scraping tools?
If you have a specific scraping case for publicly accessible Facebook data, check out these simple scrapers. They're designed to handle Facebook post scraping (both in pages and groups), extracting data from Facebook Ads Library, and even Facebook photo scraping. Take a peek and see if any of them fit the bill.
📝 Facebook Posts Scraper: extracts data from each post on the page and its details.
📜 Facebook Pages Scraper: scrapes basic info about the page.
👍 Facebook Likes Scraper: extracts Facebook reactions and likes.
🗓 Facebook Events Scraper: extracts Facebook events data.
👥 Facebook Groups Scraper: extracts Facebook data posts in public groups.
🛍 Facebook Ads Scraper: extracts data from Facebook ads.
🕵️♀️ Facebook Search Scraper: scrapes Facebook search by keyword.
🌟 Facebook Reviews Scraper: extracts Facebook reviews data from the page (text and reviewer).
🏞 Facebook Photos Scraper: extracts Facebook images and their data.
❓FAQ
👨⚖️ Is scraping Facebook comments legal?
Yes, but while scraping it’s important to adhere to ethical scraping practices and stick with scraping data that’s publicly available. Scraping personal data such as email addresses — although allowed — is generally not advised unless you have a valid reason to do so. In case of doubt, consult with legal professionals for guidance on compliance with the most recent legal practices.
⬇️ How to download Facebook comments?
To download Facebook comments from a specific post, you can find or build a Facebook scraper. Apify’s Facebook Comments scraper, for instance, allows downloading comments from multiple posts in HTML, XML, JSON, JSONL, and CSV formats. You can also extract those comments in the order that’s suitable for you: by newest, most relevant, or Facebook’s default.
🛡 Do you need proxies to scrape Facebook comments?
It's sort of a must-have as of 2023. Ever since Facebook changed its policy in 2021, you'll need some form of proxy to make sure your Facebook scraping ends up successful. While datacenter proxies may still work for some cases, our top choice is residential proxies. The good news is, our free plan includes a residential proxy free trial, so you can try out any of the Facebook scrapers under ideal conditions.
💡 Can I use Facebook API to scrape comments?
In general, yes. Facebook API (once you get its token) can provide free access to some of the data on the platform. However, extracting large amounts of data — even with the official Facebook API — can quickly lead to getting blocked.
🍪 Can I scrape Facebook data behind login?
In general, you can use cookies to scrape Facebook, but not with our Facebook scrapers. We don’t provide the option to scrape Facebook pages that are visible only after login.
🤖 Can I use AI to scrape Facebook?
AI is currently unable to scrape websites directly, but it can help generate code for scraping Facebook if you prompt it with the target elements you want to scrape. Note that the code may not be functional, and website structure and design changes may impact the targeted elements and attributes.
