Meta Posts Scraper - Facebook & Instagram Post Scraper 🚀

Scrape Facebook and Instagram posts by keyword and hashtag - no code required. Pull captions, likes, comments, shares, views, images, videos, top comments, and author details from both Meta platforms in one run, then export to JSON, CSV, Excel, or push straight into your own app via API.

✅ Both platforms in one Actor  •  ✅ Keyword and hashtag search  •  ✅ Full engagement metrics  •  ✅ Structured, ready-to-use data  •  ✅ Schedule, monitor & integrate on Apify

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⚡ What you get in 60 seconds

Type in a few keywords or hashtags, hit Start, and get a clean, structured dataset of real Facebook and Instagram posts - the kind of social data that normally takes hours of manual copy-pasting or an expensive enterprise tool.

Without this Actor	With this Actor
Manually scrolling feeds and copy-pasting	One click, structured dataset
Separate tools for Facebook and Instagram	Both platforms, one run
Screenshots and guesswork on engagement	Exact likes, comments, shares, views
Data trapped in your browser	Export to JSON/CSV/Excel or call the API

👤 Who it's for

• Marketers & social listeners tracking brand mentions, sentiment, and campaign buzz
• Content creators & agencies hunting viral posts and trending hashtags
• E-commerce & dropshippers spotting trending products before they peak
• Analysts & researchers benchmarking engagement across creators and competitors
• Developers who want social data piped into a pipeline via a clean JSON API

✨ Features

• 🔎 Keyword + hashtag search across Facebook and Instagram
• 📊 Full engagement metrics - likes/reactions, comments, shares, and (for Reels) views
• 🖼️ Rich media - image URLs, video source URLs, and poster thumbnails
• 💬 Top comments with author and body for sentiment analysis
• 🏷️ Hashtag extraction and author profile info (handle, URL, avatar)
• 🔐 Optional login per platform to reach data behind authentication walls
• 🌐 Proxy support (residential recommended) to scrape reliably at scale
• 📦 Structured output ready for BI tools, spreadsheets, and databases

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🛠️ How to use the Meta Posts Scraper

1. Click Try for free / open the Actor in Apify Console.
2. Choose your platform - Facebook, Instagram, or both.
3. Enter your search keywords and/or hashtags.
4. (Optional) Add login credentials and a residential proxy for richer, more reliable results.
5. Set Posts per query and click Start.
6. When the run finishes, open the Output / Dataset tab and export to JSON, CSV, or Excel - or grab it from the API.

💡 Tip: Start small (e.g. postsPerQuery: 5) to preview the data shape, then scale up once you're happy.

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💸 Pricing & how it scales

This Actor runs on the Apify platform, so you get scheduling, run monitoring, storage, proxy access, API, and 50+ integrations (Zapier, Make, Slack, Google Drive, webhooks) included around it.

• Free plan - Apify gives you free monthly usage credits, enough to test the Actor end-to-end and pull your first sample datasets at $0. Perfect for a proof of concept.
• Need more posts? A single run scales from a handful of posts to thousands. Upgrading from the free plan unlocks the compute, proxy bandwidth, and concurrency to collect tens of thousands of posts per month on a schedule - automatically.
• Predictable costs - you only pay for what a run actually uses. Preview cost on a small run, then extrapolate linearly before scaling.

🚀 From free to scale: the free tier is built for evaluation. When the data proves its value, a paid plan turns this from a one-off experiment into an automated, scheduled social-intelligence feed - no extra setup.

See the live Apify pricing page for current plan limits.

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📥 Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Description
platforms	string	No	"both"	"both", "facebook", or "instagram"
searchKeywords	array	No	[]	Keywords to search for posts
hashtags	array	No	[]	Hashtags to search (without the #)
postsPerQuery	integer	No	15	Max posts per keyword/hashtag (1–100)
fbEmail	string	No	-	Facebook email for login
fbPassword	string	No	-	Facebook password (stored as a secret)
igUsername	string	No	-	Instagram username for login
igPassword	string	No	-	Instagram password (stored as a secret)
loginFacebook	boolean	No	true	Log in to Facebook before scraping
loginInstagram	boolean	No	true	Log in to Instagram before scraping
proxyConfiguration	object	No	off	Proxy settings - residential strongly recommended for Facebook/Instagram

Tip: Set loginFacebook / loginInstagram to false to scrape public data only without credentials.

Example input

{
  "platforms": "both",
  "searchKeywords": ["trending products", "viral gadgets"],
  "hashtags": ["trending", "viralproducts"],
  "postsPerQuery": 15,
  "loginFacebook": false,
  "loginInstagram": false,
  "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": true, "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"] }
}

📤 Output

Each post is stored as a separate record in the dataset.

Field	Type	Description
platform	string	"facebook" or "instagram"
post_id	string	Unique post identifier
post_url	string	Direct URL to the post
author_handle	string	Author username/handle
caption	string	Post caption/text
likes_count	number	Likes/reactions
comments_count	number	Comments
shares_count	number	Shares
views_count	number	Views (Reels/video, when available)
post_date	string	When the post was published
source	string	The keyword/hashtag that found this post
hashtags_list	array	Hashtags used in the post
image_urls	array	URLs of post images
top_comments	array	Top comments (author + body)
extracted_at	string	ISO 8601 extraction timestamp

Example output

{
  "platform": "instagram",
  "post_id": "CxYz123456",
  "post_url": "https://www.instagram.com/p/CxYz123456",
  "author_handle": "@gadget_reviews",
  "caption": "This portable blender is a game-changer! 🔥 #viralproducts #amazonfinds",
  "likes_count": 12400,
  "comments_count": 328,
  "shares_count": 1540,
  "views_count": 89000,
  "post_date": "2026-03-01",
  "source": "viralproducts",
  "hashtags_list": ["viralproducts", "amazonfinds", "gadgets"],
  "image_urls": ["https://scontent.example.com/post_image.jpg"],
  "top_comments": [{ "author": "@jane", "body": "Need this!", "likes": 12 }],
  "extracted_at": "2026-03-06T14:30:00.000Z"
}

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🔗 Integrations

Push results anywhere with the Apify platform's built-in integrations:

• Webhooks to trigger your own services when a run finishes
• Zapier / Make for no-code automation
• Google Sheets / Drive, Slack, Airtable
• REST API - fetch the dataset programmatically with one call

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🤝 Related Actors

Building a wider social/e-commerce data pipeline? Pair this with other scrapers in the Apify Store for TikTok, YouTube, Amazon, and Google to enrich your dataset across channels.

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❓ FAQ

Do I need a Facebook or Instagram account? No - you can scrape public data with loginFacebook / loginInstagram set to false. Logging in can unlock richer data, but use a dedicated test account, never your personal one.

Why am I getting few or no results? Facebook and Instagram aggressively block datacenter IPs. Enable residential proxies via proxyConfiguration for reliable results - this is the single biggest factor in success rate.

Which platform should I choose? Use "both" for the widest coverage, or pick one to save time and cost.

What formats can I export? JSON, CSV, Excel, HTML, RSS, or via the API - directly from the dataset tab.

Can I run this on a schedule? Yes. Use Apify's Schedules to run the Actor hourly/daily and build an automatically updating dataset.

Is scraping social media legal? Scraping publicly available data is generally permitted, but you are responsible for complying with each platform's Terms of Service and applicable laws (including GDPR/CCPA). Do not collect personal or sensitive data without a lawful basis. See the disclaimer below.

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⚠️ Disclaimer

This Actor is intended for collecting publicly available information for legitimate purposes such as market research and analytics. You are solely responsible for how you use it and for compliance with Facebook's and Instagram's Terms of Service, robots.txt, and all applicable data-protection laws. Avoid scraping personal or sensitive data unless you have a lawful basis to do so.

🆘 Support & feedback

Found a bug, a broken selector, or want a new field added? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab - feedback is welcome and helps improve the Actor. Need a tailored or larger-scale solution? Reach out and we'll help.

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🧰 Built with

• Apify SDK - Actor framework, proxy, and dataset management
• Playwright - browser automation for Facebook and Instagram