🎬 Facebook Reels Scraper

🚀 Export Facebook Reels data in seconds. Paste a reel link, get 41 fields back in under a second, including the exact play count (753,841) instead of the rounded "753K" every other tool reports.

Facebook Reels carry the numbers that matter for short form video strategy, but the platform only ever shows them rounded. This Actor reads the public reel page directly and returns each reel as one flat row: exact plays, reactions, comments and shares, the full caption with structured hashtags and mentions, the creator profile, the audio track, and direct HD and SD video URLs. No login, no API key, no Graph API app review.

Every run returns 41 fields per reel with exact integer counters for plays, reactions, comments and shares. A single reel takes roughly 0.6 seconds to collect. Turn on related reel discovery and each link you supply expands into up to 5 more reels by the same creator, each one fetched individually so it carries the same exact counters as a reel you asked for by name.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Social media managers	Benchmark reel performance against competitors with real numbers, not rounded ones.
Short form video creators	Study which hooks, lengths and audio tracks earn plays in your niche.
Influencer marketing teams	Verify a creator's actual reach before signing a deal.
Media researchers and archivists	Preserve public reels with their captions, engagement and video files.

📋 What the Facebook Reels Scraper does

💡 Why it matters: Facebook rounds every counter it shows you. "753K plays" could be 753,001 or 753,999. When you are comparing two creators, ranking your own back catalogue, or reporting a campaign result, that rounding hides exactly the differences you are trying to measure.

• 🔢 Exact counters. Plays, reactions, comments and shares come back as real integers (753841, 179438, 3483, 17843), not as display strings.
• 🔗 Flexible input. Accepts facebook.com/reel/ID links, facebook.com/watch/?v=ID links, and bare numeric reel IDs.
• 🧵 Structured captions. Hashtags, mentions and external links are parsed out of the caption into their own arrays, with the profile URL and ID resolved for every mention.
• 🎵 Audio intelligence. Track title, original audio flag, soundtrack ID and cover art for the sound behind each reel.
• 🎥 Direct video access. HD and SD progressive URLs plus the DASH manifest, ready to download or probe.
• 🔍 Related reel discovery. Optionally expand each link into more reels by the same creator.
• 📦 One fixed schema. Every reel lands with the same 41 columns, so your spreadsheet or database mapping never breaks.

🎬 Full Demo (🚧 Coming soon)

A short walkthrough video is in production and will land here.

📊 Output

Each reel becomes one flat row. These are the main fields:

Field	Type	Description
🖼 imageUrl	string	Reel thumbnail image.
🆔 reelId	string	Facebook's numeric reel ID.
🔗 url	string	Canonical reel link.
📝 caption	string	Full caption text as the creator wrote it.
👤 authorName	string	Creator display name.
🏷 authorUsername	string	Handle, when the reel comes from a linked Instagram account.
🌐 authorProfileUrl	string	Creator profile link.
🪪 authorId	string	Creator numeric ID.
🧭 authorType	string	FACEBOOK_USER, SHADOW_IG_USER or FACEBOOK_PAGE.
✅ authorIsVerified	string	Yes or No.
🖼 authorProfilePicUrl	string	Creator avatar.
🕒 publishedAt	string	Exact publish time in ISO 8601.
⏱ publishedTimestamp	integer	Publish time as a Unix epoch.
▶️ viewCount	integer	Exact play count.
❤️ reactionCount	integer	Exact total reactions.
💬 commentCount	integer	Exact comment count.
🔁 shareCount	integer	Exact share count.
⏳ durationSeconds	number	Reel length in seconds.
📐 width / height / aspectRatio	number	Video dimensions.
🎥 videoHdUrl / videoSdUrl	string	Direct progressive video URLs.
📡 dashManifestUrl	string	DASH manifest for adaptive playback.
🎵 audioTrackTitle	string	Audio track behind the reel.
🎼 isOriginalAudio	string	Yes when the creator's own audio.
🖼 audioArtUrl	string	Audio cover art.
🔀 isRemixable / isReshare	string	Yes or No.
🔎 isRelatedReel	string	No for reels you asked for, Yes for discovered ones.
📮 postId	string	Underlying post ID.
#️⃣ hashtags	array	Hashtags parsed from the caption.
👥 mentions	array	Tagged profiles with name, URL and ID.
🌍 externalLinks	array	External URLs found in the caption.
🕒 scrapedAt	string	Collection timestamp.
❌ error	string	Populated only on a failed reel.

Three real records from a live run:

{
  "imageUrl": "https://scontent-iad3-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t51.71878-10/497894651_24...",
  "reelId": "1000004045579882",
  "url": "https://www.facebook.com/reel/1000004045579882",
  "caption": "NEXT CONCERT: JUNE 6th  IN HAMBURG! 👉🏻 https://www.ticketlotse.com/event/?id=1535",
  "authorName": "Levi Schechtmann",
  "authorProfileUrl": "https://www.facebook.com/levi.schechtmann.1",
  "authorId": "100006199232258",
  "authorType": "FACEBOOK_USER",
  "authorIsVerified": "No",
  "publishedAt": "2025-05-16T13:16:02.000Z",
  "viewCount": 753841,
  "reactionCount": 179438,
  "commentCount": 3483,
  "shareCount": 17843,
  "durationSeconds": 127.066,
  "width": 1080,
  "height": 1920,
  "audioTrackTitle": "Levi Schechtmann · Original audio",
  "isOriginalAudio": "Yes",
  "isRelatedReel": "No",
  "hashtags": [],
  "externalLinks": ["https://www.ticketlotse.com/event/?id=1535"]
}

{
  "reelId": "1000000668639013",
  "url": "https://www.facebook.com/reel/1000000668639013",
  "caption": "APLICAÇÃO DE LASTEX NO CROCHE #crochetinspiration #crochet #crochê #croche",
  "authorName": "croche_art_requinte",
  "authorProfileUrl": "https://www.facebook.com/simonelnascimemto",
  "authorType": "FACEBOOK_USER",
  "publishedAt": "2025-06-12T20:49:45.000Z",
  "viewCount": 6814,
  "reactionCount": 68,
  "commentCount": 3,
  "shareCount": 19,
  "durationSeconds": 30.899,
  "audioTrackTitle": "Brent Bourgeois · In The Garden",
  "isOriginalAudio": "Yes",
  "hashtags": ["crochetinspiration", "crochet", "crochê", "croche"]
}

{
  "reelId": "1000003431344836",
  "url": "https://www.facebook.com/reel/1000003431344836",
  "authorName": "Valerie Lee",
  "authorUsername": "oatslady",
  "authorProfileUrl": "https://www.instagram.com/_u/oatslady",
  "authorType": "SHADOW_IG_USER",
  "publishedAt": "2024-07-04T12:22:35.000Z",
  "viewCount": 13637,
  "reactionCount": 2192,
  "commentCount": 0,
  "shareCount": 206,
  "durationSeconds": 11.366,
  "audioTrackTitle": "Adam Griffith · Bliss",
  "hashtags": ["ricekrispytreats", "chocolatepeanutbutter", "ricekrispies", "snacks", "easyrecipes"],
  "mentions": [
    { "name": "oatslady", "url": "https://www.instagram.com/_u/oatslady", "id": "17841400708581687" }
  ]
}

✨ Why choose this Actor

• Exact numbers, not rounded ones. Most Facebook Reels tools hand you the same "753K" the page shows. This Actor returns 753,841.
• Fast and light. It reads the public reel page over plain HTTP. No browser, no 4 GB of RAM, roughly 0.6 seconds per reel.
• Honest about its limits. The section below tells you exactly what this Actor cannot reach, before you spend anything.
• Clean, stable schema. 41 columns, identical on every row, with sentinels instead of nulls so CSV and Excel imports stay predictable.
• No credentials. No Facebook login, no Graph API app review, no page access token.

📈 How it compares to alternatives

	This Actor	Typical Facebook Reels scrapers
Play count precision	Exact integer (753,841)	Rounded display string ("753K")
Share count precision	Exact integer (17,843)	Rounded ("17K")
Input	Reel URLs, watch URLs, bare reel IDs	Usually page or profile URLs
Whole page or profile catalogue	No. See the ceiling below	Yes, most competitors do this
Runtime per reel	About 0.6 seconds	Several seconds, browser based
Memory	512 MB	Commonly 4 GB
Login required	No	No

The ceiling, stated plainly. This Actor works from reel links, not from page or profile links. Facebook serves a page's Reels tab, its hashtag pages and its video search entirely through client side rendering, with no reel data in the page source, so a logged out HTTP client cannot enumerate a creator's full reel catalogue. What Facebook does publish on every reel page is up to 5 more reels by the same creator, and the includeRelatedReels option collects those. That expansion saturates quickly: in testing, following the suggestions from one creator surfaced about 6 to 7 distinct reels before Facebook stopped offering new ones. If you need every reel a page has ever posted, a browser based Actor is the right tool and this one is not.

🚀 How to use

1. Create a free Apify account. New accounts get $5 in free credit. Sign up here.
2. Open the Actor and go to the Input tab.
3. Paste your reel links into Facebook Reel URLs. A facebook.com/reel/... link, a facebook.com/watch/?v=... link or a bare numeric reel ID all work.
4. Set Max Items to the number of reels you want back.
5. Optionally turn on related reel discovery to expand each link into more reels by the same creator.
6. Click Start and watch the log.
7. Download your data from the Storage tab as CSV, JSON, Excel or XML, or pull it from the API.

💼 Business use cases

📊 Competitive benchmarking.

A social media manager at a beverage brand collects the top reels from four competitor accounts each month. Because the play and share counts come back exact, quarter over quarter movement of a few thousand plays is visible instead of being flattened into the same "1.2M" every month.

🤝 Influencer vetting.

An influencer marketing team receives a media kit claiming "over 500K average views per reel". They run the creator's last dozen reel links through the Actor and compare the claimed figure against the exact play counts before signing.

🎯 Creative research.

A short form video studio pulls reels from a niche, then correlates durationSeconds, isOriginalAudio and audioTrackTitle against viewCount to work out which lengths and sounds actually travel in that category.

🗄️ Campaign archival.

An agency closing out a campaign captures every reel it produced, with captions, hashtags, engagement counts and the direct video URLs, so the results are preserved after the client's page changes hands.

🔌 Automating Facebook Reels Scraper

• Make: trigger a run when a new reel link lands in a spreadsheet, then route the row into your reporting sheet.
• Zapier: connect the Actor to thousands of apps and start a run from any trigger.
• Slack: post a summary of each run into a team channel so performance updates arrive where the team already is.
• Airbyte: sync the dataset into your warehouse for long term trend analysis.
• GitHub: schedule runs from an Actions workflow and commit the results alongside your reporting code.
• Google Drive: drop each run's CSV into a shared folder for the wider team.

🌟 Beyond business use cases

• Research: media and communications researchers building corpora of short form video and its measured reach.
• Personal: creators auditing their own back catalogue to find which reels actually performed.
• Non-profit: advocacy organisations measuring how far a public awareness reel travelled.
• Experimentation: developers prototyping recommendation or virality models against real engagement numbers.

🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper

Paste this into ChatGPT, Claude or any assistant to plan your run:

I am using the ParseForge Facebook Reels Scraper on Apify. It takes Facebook reel URLs, watch URLs or bare reel IDs and returns 41 fields per reel, including exact play, reaction, comment and share counts, the caption with parsed hashtags and mentions, the creator profile, the audio track, and direct HD and SD video URLs. It cannot enumerate a whole page or profile catalogue, though it can expand each reel into up to 5 more reels by the same creator. Help me design an input for [describe your goal].

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

🔑 Do I need a Facebook login or API key? No. The Actor reads public reel pages. There is no login, no cookie and no Graph API token involved.

▶️ Why do you say the play counts are exact? Facebook formats its counters server side according to the language you request. In English it rounds to "753K". This Actor requests a locale that never abbreviates, so the same reel returns 753,841. You can switch back to the rounded values with the Counter format option if you prefer them.

📄 Can I scrape every reel from a Facebook page? No. Facebook renders a page's Reels tab entirely in the browser, so there is no reel data in the page source for a logged out client to read. Turn on related reel discovery to expand a reel into roughly 6 to 7 reels by the same creator, or use a browser based Actor if you need a full catalogue.

🔗 What input formats are accepted? https://www.facebook.com/reel/1000004045579882, https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1000004045579882, and a bare 1000004045579882 all resolve to the same reel.

💬 Does it return the comments themselves? No. Facebook does not include comment text in the public reel page, only the comment count. Use the Facebook Comments Scraper for comment bodies.

🎥 Are the video URLs permanent? No. Facebook signs its CDN URLs and they expire after a few hours. Download the file during or shortly after the run if you need to keep it.

📊 Why is viewCount sometimes "Not Disclosed"? Some reels do not publish a play count at all. When Facebook shows no figure, the Actor reports the sentinel rather than inventing one.

🏷 Why is authorUsername often "Not Disclosed"? A handle only exists when the reel was cross posted from a linked Instagram account (authorType is SHADOW_IG_USER). Native Facebook profiles have no username in this payload, so authorProfileUrl is the identifier to use.

🌍 Do I need a proxy? No. Facebook serves this data to ordinary datacenter traffic and the Actor runs without a proxy by default. Enable Apify Proxy if you are running at high volume.

⚡ How fast is it? About 0.6 seconds per reel. A five reel run finishes in roughly six seconds including startup.

🔢 What happens if a reel is deleted or private? The Actor writes a row containing only an error message explaining that the reel is unavailable. Error rows are never billed.

📦 What export formats are available? CSV, JSON, Excel and XML from the Storage tab, or straight from the Apify API.

🔌 Integrate with any app

Every run's dataset is available through the Apify API, so you can pull results into any language or platform that speaks HTTP. Apify also ships official clients for JavaScript and Python, plus native integrations for Make, Zapier, Airbyte, Slack, GitHub and Google Drive.

🔗 Recommended Actors

• Facebook Posts Scraper - posts from public pages and profiles with reactions, shares and media.
• Facebook Comments Scraper - the comment bodies this Actor deliberately leaves out.
• Facebook Pages Scraper - page profile data, follower counts and verification status.
• Instagram Reel Scraper - the same job on the other half of Meta's short form video.
• TikTok Profile Scraper - round out a cross platform short form video dataset.

💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection.

🆘 Need Help? Open our contact form

⚠️ Disclaimer: This is an independent tool, not affiliated with or endorsed by Facebook or Meta. It collects only publicly available data.