Hey, we're Apify. The Apify platform gives you access to over 2,000 data extraction tools and unofficial APIs for popular websites. Check us out.
This unofficial Facebook Groups API solution is a scraper able to extract full Facebook Groups data. Within a few minutes, you can get raw data from Facebook Groups, including posts, comments, basic commenter info, reactions, and more.
Once you’ve extracted this data, you can easily incorporate it into your current projects and applications by downloading it to your computer or sending it to your own database.
🧪 How can I use data from Facebook groups?
👋 Analyzing sentiment. Evaluate the brand’s public perception and back up your insights with data.
🦻 Creating a customer-centric strategy. Analyze customer interaction at scale and understand expectations. Improve your customer service by applying social listening strategy.
🩸 Identifying pain points and trends. Analyze discussions and conversations in the group and stay fully up to date with market demands. Identify trending topics, questions, and concerns among group followers.
📰 Identifying hot spots of fake news or purposeful misinformation; track down its origins and bot farms.
🤝 Community building. Engage with group members by providing valuable information, resources, and support. By extension, with social listening, you'll be able to establish your brand as a trusted authority, come up with content ideas that will resonate, and even build relationships with potential customers.
🧱 Product development. Use the insights gathered from the group discussions to inform your decisions on the development of new products or services that meet the needs of the target audience.
🥾 Step-by-step guide to scraping Facebook Groups
Step 1. Head over to Apify Store and click Try for free
Welcome to our library of 1,000+ ready-to-use data extraction tools! It has a scraper tool for any website you can think of, including social media. Search for "Facebook" there, and you’ll quickly find our Facebook Groups Scraper 🔗, among others. Click the Try for free button.
If you don't have an Apify account yet, you can sign up by just using your email (Gmail or other) or GitHub account, and start a free trial in Apify Console right away.
Step 2. Find and copy-paste a Facebook group to scrape
Now let’s pick the Facebook group you’re interested in scraping. Go over to facebook.com and copy-paste the group URL into the input field.
You can add as many groups as you want, specify the number of posts you want to extract from each group, and the way of sorting the posts. Bear in mind that the group has to be public 🌎
Step 3. Click Start ▶️
Now that you’ve dealt with those 3 fields, click the Start button. You’ll see the scraper’s status change to Running 🏃🏻♀️ Now it should only take a few minutes till you see the status change to Succeeded 🏁 and see what data you’ve managed to extract.
Step 4. Collect your data
After the run has finished (4 minutes in our case) you will be able to view (pun intended 👁) and download extracted data. To access your data simply click on the Export results button or navigate to the Storage tab.
Last but not least, you can export the data in a format that suits the needs of your data project: CSV, HTML, JSON, Excel, or XML. You can preview your datasets before downloading them by clicking on the Preview 👁 button.
That's it! You can now easily extract data from Facebook Groups.
🌈 Need to scrape Facebook reviews data or events?
In case you want to scrape other data from Facebook, feel free to try any of these Facebook scraping tools. These scrapers are designed for scraping Facebook reviews, comments, photos, and ads in particular, and they are just as simple to use as the Facebook Groups one above.
🛍 Facebook Ads Scraper: extracts data from Facebook ads.
🕵️♀️ Facebook Search Scraper: scrapes Facebook search by keyword.
🗓 Facebook Events Scraper: extracts Facebook events data.
🌟 Facebook Reviews Scraper: extracts Facebook reviews data from the page (text and reviewer).
🏞 Facebook Photos Scraper: extracts Facebook images and their data.
📝 Facebook Posts Scraper: extracts data from each post on the page and its details.
📜 Facebook Pages Scraper: scrapes basic info about the page.
💬 Facebook Comments Scraper: extracts comments from the posts.
👍 Facebook Likes Scraper: extracts Facebook reactions and likes.
🎮Facebook Games Scraper: extracts info about Facebook games and live streams.
❓FAQs
🛡 Why do you need proxies to scrape Facebook Groups?
Facebook has implemented a lot of constraints into its official policy on data extraction, so since 2021 any Facebook scraping tool needs a proxy to extract data successfully. While datacenter proxies can still provide you some output outputs, residential proxies are the best option for any Facebook scraping. Luckily, our free plan includes a residential proxy free trial, so you can test Facebook scraping with and without proxies for yourself.
🔒 Can I scrape private Facebook groups?
No, this scraper only scrapes Facebook groups that are public. If you need more advanced data extraction, you can consider building your own Facebook scraper. Private Facebook Group data is only visible when you’re logged in. So your scraper will have to include an option of logging in, most probably using cookies. Note that Facebook doesn’t endorse scraping of any kind, especially scraping behind the login wall.
🍪 Do I need cookies to scrape Facebook private groups?
Yes. However, scraping behind login is against Facebook’s Terms of Service so our Facebook scrapers don’t allow that. However, Terms of Service for cookie-based authentication vary from website to website.
💬 Can I scrape comments with Facebook Groups Scraper?
Yes, you can scrape the commenter’s info, comment text, how many likes it got, and the total amount of comments under every Facebook post. If you need to scrape comments in general from a post on a page (not a group), use Facebook Comments Scraper 💬.
⚖️ Is scraping data from Facebook Groups legal?
In general, yes. Our Facebook scrapers only extract public data from Facebook Groups, and we make sure to adhere to the practices of ethical web scraping. However, scraping ethically still means taking several regulations into account, such as the GDPR and CCPA. The legality of web scraping is a lot about personal data, full explanation here.
