Facebook Groups Scraper — Posts, Reactions, Top Comments & Media from Public Groups

Turn any public Facebook group into structured data. Paste group URLs and the Actor returns each post with its full text, author, permalink, timestamp, reaction breakdown (likes, loves, total), share and comment counts, photo/video attachments and the top comments on the post.

Add a date cut-off, a keyword and year filter, or one of four sort strategies to target exactly the posts you need. Optional cookie login is supported for deeper access — but the Actor works fine without it.

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What you get

📝 Post	❤️ Engagement	💬 Comments & media
Post ID and legacy ID	Total reaction count	Up to 2 top comments per post
Direct post permalink	Like count	Comment author, text and likes
Full post text	Love count	Comment threading depth
Publication timestamp	Share count	Photos with URI + dimensions
Author name and ID	Comment count	Accessibility caption (OCR-style text)
Group title and group ID	Feedback object ID	Media set / album links

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Key features

• Four sorting strategies. CHRONOLOGICAL (newest first), RECENT_ACTIVITY (most active discussions), TOP_POSTS (highest engagement) and CHRONOLOGICAL_LISTINGS — the last one built specifically for buy/sell groups, where listings behave differently from discussion posts.
• Reaction breakdown, not just a number. Separate reactionLikeCount and reactionLoveCount alongside the total, so you can tell polite approval from genuine enthusiasm.
• Top comments included. Each post carries up to two of its most interesting top-level comments with author, text, like count and threading depth — enough context to understand a thread without a second scraper.
• Date cut-off. onlyPostsNewerThan stops the run once posts get older than your boundary. Accepts absolute dates (2026-01-15) or plain language (7 days, 2 weeks, 1 month) — ideal for scheduled monitoring where you only want what is new.
• Keyword + year filtering. Narrow a group's history to a specific year and search term.
• Unlimited mode. Leave the post limit empty to collect everything the group feed will give you.
• Optional cookie login. Supply a Facebook cookie string to reach content that is gated behind a login wall. Entirely optional — leave it empty and the Actor runs anonymously.
• Residential proxy with auto-retry. Rotation and retry logic are built in, so long runs survive Facebook's rate limiting.
• Bulk groups per run. Scrape many groups in a single job; every row records which group it came from.

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Use cases

• Community & audience research — understand what a niche actually talks about, with engagement numbers attached.
• Lead generation — surface posts that signal buying intent and follow up through the public post.
• Buy/sell group monitoring — use CHRONOLOGICAL_LISTINGS to track marketplace-style groups for new listings.
• Brand & competitor monitoring — catch mentions of your product inside communities, including how people reply to them.
• Content strategy & SEO — mine real questions and phrasing for content that ranks and resonates.
• Trend detection — schedule a daily run with a 7 days cut-off and watch which topics accelerate.
• Social listening & sentiment work — post text plus top comments gives you both the claim and the community's reaction.
• Academic and market research — build reproducible datasets of public community discourse.

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How it works

1. You supply one or more public group URLs, a post limit and (optionally) filters.
2. The Actor bootstraps each group — it resolves the group's internal node ID and the tokens needed to page the feed, straight from the public page.
3. The feed is paginated in your chosen sort order, cursor by cursor, with randomised delays and up to 3 retries per request.
4. Every post node is normalised into a flat record: text, author, timestamp, permalink, reactions, counts, attachments and top comments.
5. Filters are applied — the date cut-off stops pagination early once posts fall outside your window.
6. Rows stream into the dataset as they are extracted.

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Quick start

1. Copy the URL of a public Facebook group.
2. Paste it into Facebook Group URLs — add more lines for more groups.
3. Set Number of Posts to Scrape (start with 20–50; leave empty for everything).
4. Pick a Post Sorting Strategy — CHRONOLOGICAL is a good default.
5. Click Start, then export the Output tab as CSV, Excel or JSON.

Minimal input

{
  "startUrls": ["https://www.facebook.com/groups/cheapmealideas/"],
  "resultsLimit": 50,
  "viewOption": "CHRONOLOGICAL"
}

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Input configuration

Field	Type	Default	Description
startUrls	array	— (required)	One or more public Facebook group URLs. Private groups require authentication and are not supported anonymously.
resultsLimit	integer	10	Maximum posts to scrape per group. Leave empty to collect all available posts.
viewOption	string	CHRONOLOGICAL	CHRONOLOGICAL (newest first), RECENT_ACTIVITY (most recently active threads), TOP_POSTS (most engaged), CHRONOLOGICAL_LISTINGS (buy/sell groups).
onlyPostsNewerThan	string	—	Stop when posts are older than this. Absolute (2026-01-15) or relative (7 days, 2 weeks, 1 month).
searchGroupKeyword	string	—	Keyword filter for posts inside the group. See the note below.
searchGroupYear	string	—	Restrict to a year (e.g. 2026). Works best combined with a keyword.
proxyConfiguration	object	Apify Proxy, RESIDENTIAL	Residential rotation with automatic retry. Recommended for anything at scale.
cookieString	string	—	Optional. A Facebook cookie header (must include at least c_user and xs) to run logged in. Use a dedicated secondary account — cookies grant access to that account.

About keyword search: Facebook's in-group search is heavily limited for logged-out visitors. Full words often return nothing. The reliable pattern is 1–2 letters combined with a year filter; for precise topic filtering, it is usually better to scrape broadly and filter the text column afterwards in your spreadsheet or code.

Note on limits: the post limit applies most predictably to the "new posts" (chronological) ordering.

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Output data

One row per post.

Field	Type	Description
id	string	Facebook post node ID.
legacyId	string	Legacy numeric post ID.
url	string	Direct permalink to the post.
text	string	Full post text.
time	string	Publication timestamp (ISO, UTC).
user	object	{ id, name } for the post author.
likesCount	number	Total reactions.
reactionLikeCount	number	👍 Like reactions.
reactionLoveCount	number	❤️ Love reactions.
topReactionsCount	number	Combined top-reaction total.
commentsCount	number	Comments on the post.
sharesCount	number	Shares.
topComments	array	Up to 2 top-level comments: author, text, likesCount, threadingDepth.
attachments	array	Photos and media with image.uri, image.width, image.height, id, thumbnail, ocrText (accessibility caption), owner info and album/media-set links.
groupTitle	string	Name of the group.
facebookId	string	Group ID.
facebookUrl / inputUrl	string	The group URL this post came from.
feedbackId	string	Facebook's internal feedback object ID.
pageAdLibrary	object	Ad Library reference for the group/page.

Example output

{
  "id": "UzpfSTEwMDAwMTIzNDU2Nzg5MDoxMjM0NTY3ODkw",
  "legacyId": "1234567890123456",
  "url": "https://www.facebook.com/groups/cheapmealideas/posts/1234567890123456/",
  "text": "Weekly shop came to £31 for four people. Full breakdown below 👇",
  "time": "2026-08-06T07:14:52.000Z",
  "user": { "id": "100001234567890", "name": "Jamie Example" },
  "likesCount": 512,
  "reactionLikeCount": 431,
  "reactionLoveCount": 74,
  "topReactionsCount": 505,
  "commentsCount": 96,
  "sharesCount": 23,
  "topComments": [
    { "text": "This is genuinely useful, thank you!", "likesCount": "18", "threadingDepth": 0 }
  ],
  "attachments": [
    {
      "__typename": "Photo",
      "image": { "uri": "https://scontent.xx.fbcdn.net/…", "width": 1080, "height": 1440 },
      "id": "9876543210",
      "ocrText": "May be an image of text that says 'WEEKLY SHOP £31'"
    }
  ],
  "groupTitle": "Cheap Meal Ideas",
  "facebookId": "123456789012345",
  "inputUrl": "https://www.facebook.com/groups/cheapmealideas/"
}

Illustrative values — a live run returns current Facebook data.

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Usage examples

Daily monitoring — only what is new

{
  "startUrls": ["https://www.facebook.com/groups/yourniche/"],
  "viewOption": "CHRONOLOGICAL",
  "onlyPostsNewerThan": "1 day",
  "resultsLimit": 500
}

Save as a Task, attach a daily Schedule, and deduplicate on id.

Best-performing content in a community

{
  "startUrls": ["https://www.facebook.com/groups/yourniche/"],
  "viewOption": "TOP_POSTS",
  "resultsLimit": 300
}

Sort the export by likesCount and commentsCount.

Buy/sell group listings

{
  "startUrls": ["https://www.facebook.com/groups/localbuysell/"],
  "viewOption": "CHRONOLOGICAL_LISTINGS",
  "onlyPostsNewerThan": "7 days",
  "resultsLimit": 1000
}

Historical pull for a specific year

{
  "startUrls": ["https://www.facebook.com/groups/yourniche/"],
  "searchGroupKeyword": "a",
  "searchGroupYear": "2025",
  "resultsLimit": 500
}

Several groups in one run

{
  "startUrls": [
    "https://www.facebook.com/groups/groupone/",
    "https://www.facebook.com/groups/grouptwo/",
    "https://www.facebook.com/groups/groupthree/"
  ],
  "resultsLimit": 200,
  "viewOption": "RECENT_ACTIVITY"
}

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Run it from your own code

Python

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_APIFY_API_TOKEN>")

run = client.actor("scraperx/facebook-groups-scraper").call(run_input={
    "startUrls": ["https://www.facebook.com/groups/cheapmealideas/"],
    "resultsLimit": 100,
    "viewOption": "CHRONOLOGICAL",
    "onlyPostsNewerThan": "30 days",
})

for post in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(post["time"], post["user"]["name"], post["likesCount"], post["text"][:80])

JavaScript

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: '<YOUR_APIFY_API_TOKEN>' });

const run = await client.actor('scraperx/facebook-groups-scraper').call({
    startUrls: ['https://www.facebook.com/groups/cheapmealideas/'],
    resultsLimit: 100,
    viewOption: 'CHRONOLOGICAL',
});

const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items);

cURL

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/scraperx~facebook-groups-scraper/runs?token=<YOUR_APIFY_API_TOKEN>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"startUrls":["https://www.facebook.com/groups/cheapmealideas/"],"resultsLimit":100}'

Integrations

Push posts to Google Sheets, Airtable, Slack, Make, Zapier, Google Drive or any endpoint via webhooks, and pair with Schedules for continuous community monitoring.

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Pricing

Pay-per-event: a small Actor-start charge plus a charge per post row delivered to your dataset. You pay for the posts you get, not for run time. Current rates are on the Pricing tab of this Actor's page, and Apify shows an estimate before and during every run.

Cost tip: combine onlyPostsNewerThan with a schedule so recurring runs only pay for genuinely new posts.

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Limits & good to know

• Public groups only without cookies. Private and closed groups require membership; the Actor does not bypass that.
• In-group keyword search is limited for logged-out sessions. Prefer scraping broadly and filtering the text column, or use the 1–2 letter + year trick.
• resultsLimit is per group, so five groups at 200 posts can yield 1,000 rows.
• Facebook restricts how far back a public feed can be paged; very old posts may be unreachable regardless of your limit.
• topComments returns up to 2 comments per post — it is context, not a full comment export.
• Media URIs point at Facebook's CDN and expire; download assets promptly if you need to keep them.
• If you use cookieString, use a dedicated secondary account: the cookie grants access to that account, and automated activity can get accounts restricted.
• Default run options are 4 GB memory and a 1-hour timeout — raise the timeout for large multi-group runs.

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FAQ

Do I need to log in? No. The Actor runs anonymously on public groups. The cookieString field is optional and only needed for content behind a login wall.

Can it scrape private groups? Not anonymously. Only public group content is accessible without membership.

Does it return comments? Yes — up to two top comments per post, with author, text, like count and threading depth, alongside the total comment count.

What is CHRONOLOGICAL_LISTINGS for? Buy/sell groups, where Facebook renders listings differently from ordinary discussion posts.

How do I only get new posts each day? Set onlyPostsNewerThan to 1 day (or 7 days) and schedule the run.

Why does keyword search return nothing? Facebook's logged-out group search barely works with full words. Use one or two letters plus a year, or filter the exported text column instead.

Can I scrape everything in a group? Leave resultsLimit empty to go as deep as Facebook's feed allows. Very old history may still be capped by Facebook.

Which export formats are supported? JSON, CSV, Excel (XLSX), XML and RSS. JSON keeps user, topComments and attachments nested.

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Legal & responsible use

This Actor collects publicly visible content from public Facebook groups. It does not join groups, bypass privacy settings, or access private data. Posts, comments and profile names relate to real people — if you process this data, make sure you have a lawful basis under GDPR and similar regimes, and comply with Facebook's terms and applicable law. If you supply cookies, you are responsible for that account's use.

Support

Need more comments per post, extra fields, or a custom group-monitoring pipeline? Open an issue on the Issues tab.