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In this blog post, we'll first learn how to use Facebook Posts Scraper to extract posts from Facebook pages. Then, we'll explore a few other Facebook scraping tools and answer frequently asked questions about scraping Facebook data.
🧪 How can I use scraped Facebook posts data?
Scraping Facebook data can be useful for various reasons, among them: market research, sentiment analysis, or insights into customer behavior. More examples include:
👩🔬 Conduct basic audience analysis. Analyze audience engagement metrics, such as comments, shares, and reactions, to gain insights into the interests, demographics, and behaviors of any group.
🦹 Understand your competition. Analyze content, tone, and Facebook Page activities to gain insights into opinions of your competitors' offers. Use these insights to play to your strengths and stand out.
🩸 Find pain points and identify trends. Identify trending topics, questions, and concerns among the Page followers. Understand the Facebook Page audience by applying social listening and come up with content ideas that will resonate with them.
🎯 Create targeted advertising. Analyze Facebook data across demographics, interests, and various community engagement metrics. Use it to create precise advertising campaigns able to reach the right audience with the right message.
📰 Detect fake news as well as organized attempts in spreading disinformation or inaccurate information with high public value.
🥾 Step-by-step guide to scraping Facebook posts
Step 1. Find Facebook Posts Scraper
Head over to Apify Store, and search for Facebook Posts Scraper 🔗 Click the ▶️ Try for free button to get started — you guessed it — for free.
If you don't have an Apify account yet, it's easy to sign up with your GitHub or email account of any provider. Welcome to Apify Console, your workspace to run or build web scraping tools.
Step 2. Choose one or several Facebook pages or profiles
Now that you're on the scraper page in Console, it’s time enter the URL of the Facebook Page or Facebook Profile you want to extract posts from. To do that, open facebook.com , find the page of your interest, and copy-paste its URL.
You can also set the maximum number of posts you want to scrape. So for our example, let’s find the Humans of New York page and extract its 20 most recent posts.
Facebook URLs fieldStep 3. Click Start ▶️
Once you're all set with the URL and number of posts, hit the Start button. The scraper will begin data extraction from the Facebook Page and posts. The status will change to Running 🏃🏻♀️ and you'll need to wait until the process is complete. It won’t take too long to see the status change to Succeeded 🏁
Step 4. Download data from Facebook posts
Click on the Export button to download your data. Our Humans of NY has brought us 20 scraped posts as well as their details.
You can Preview 👁 and download Facebook data in JSON, CSV, Excel, and other formats. Each extract post includes data such as post text and URL, number of likes, shares, and comments under each post, page URL, timestamp, and more.
Preview 👁 the extracted data as a table, spreadsheet, CSV or JSON
Now you can easily extract data from Facebook posts. It's that simple! 🥳
Theo Vasilis
🌈 Need a different Facebook scraping tool?
Try out some of these other Facebook crawlers. They are custom-built for each Facebook scraping scenario, such as groups, reviews, comments, or photos. You are welcome to check them out.
🕵️♀️ Facebook Search Scraper: scrapes Facebook search by keyword.
📜 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 Groups Scraper: extracts Facebook data posts in public groups.
🛍 Facebook Ads Scraper: extracts data from Facebook ads.
🗓 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.
❓ FAQ
❌ Is Facebook against scraping?
Facebook’s official policy has a lot of anti-scraping sentiment, but the company doesn’t stick with it when it comes to its own practices. Since 2021, Meta has been consistently working towards applying more and more pressure (both technically and legally) on people and companies that can scrape Facebook at scale.
🧑⚖️ Is scraping Facebook posts legal?
Facebook Posts can be scraped legally, as long as it's done with ethical consideration and doesn’t involve extracting personal data. Personal data should only be scraped for a legitimate reason. A good place to kick off research on this topic is our Is web scraping legal? post.
🗓 Is it possible to scrape Facebook Events?
Yes, it is. Facebook Events can be scraped in a similar way to scraping Facebook Posts. To that end, you can use a ready-made tool like the Facebook Events Scraper 🔗 and in a few minutes get all Facebook events data: event name, date, time, location, and more.
💬 Can I scrape Facebook comments?
To scrape Facebook comments, you can use a tool like the Facebook Comments Scraper 🔗. This tool allows you to extract comments from Facebook posts, along with other data such as the time when the comment was posted, number of reactions it collected, and URL of the user who posted it.
🛡 Do I need proxies to scrape Facebook posts?
Most likely, yes. Following Facebook's strong crackdown on scrapers since 2021, these days you'll need a proxy to scrape Facebook effectively. Although datacenter proxies may still get you some Facebook data, for consistent results we highly recommend using residential proxies instead. Fortunately, our free plan comes with a residential proxy free trial, allowing you to fully test any Facebook scraper.
📄 Why is this scraper better than Facebook API?
Facebook Posts Scraper is a better option than Facebook API because it allows you to extract data from Facebook posts without any limitations. Facebook API restricts the amount of data you can extract and requires approval from Facebook. Additionally, Facebook Posts Scraper is more user-friendly and requires no coding experience, whereas using Facebook’s API requires some level of programming knowledge.
🙋♂️ What’s a Facebook page and a Facebook profile?
Facebook Pages are used by brands, companies, and organizations to provide information about their product or service. They're all about posting public content and usually are associated with a particular category (Politics, Music, Non-profit, etc.). Of course, the easiest way to distinguish between pages and profiles is a blue checkmark. This scraper tool can extract info from Facebook profiles and Facebook pages.
