Facebook Page Posts Scraper

A robust and efficient Apify actor for scraping public Facebook page posts with advanced date filtering, pagination handling, and comprehensive post data extraction.

🌟 Features

• Flexible Date Filtering: Scrape posts within specific date ranges or go back a set number of days
• Chunked Scraping: Processes data in configurable time chunks for stability and reliability
• Complete Post Data: Extracts text, media, engagement metrics, timestamps, and metadata
• Error Recovery: Built-in retry logic and error handling for robust operation
• Video Support: Detects and extracts video posts with view counts
• Media Extraction: Captures photos, videos, and carousel posts
• Engagement Metrics: Collects likes, comments, shares, and reactions

📋 Input Parameters

Required Parameters

• Page IDs or Page URLs: Facebook page identifiers or full URLs to scrape
  • Examples: "cnn", "https://www.facebook.com/cnn"

Optional Parameters

• Posts Per Page (default: 5): Number of posts to fetch per API request
• Max Posts (default: 10000): Maximum total posts to scrape per page
• Start Date: Begin scraping from this date (YYYY-MM-DD format)
• End Date: Stop scraping at this date (YYYY-MM-DD format)

📊 Output Format

Each post includes:

{
  "postId": "123456789",
  "text": "Post content...",
  "timestamp": 1234567890,
  "time": "2024-01-01T12:00:00.000Z",
  "url": "https://www.facebook.com/...",
  "likes": 1234,
  "comments": 56,
  "shares": 78,
  "isVideo": false,
  "viewsCount": 0,
  "media": [...],
  "user": {
    "id": "...",
    "name": "Page Name",
    "profileUrl": "...",
    "profilePic": "..."
  }
}

🚀 Usage Example

Input Configuration

{
  "pageUrls": ["https://www.facebook.com/cnn"],
  "postsPerPage": 10,
  "maxPosts": 500,
  "startDate": "2024-01-01",
  "endDate": "2024-12-31",
}

💡 Best Practices

1. Date Ranges: Use smaller date ranges (1-3 months) for more reliable scraping
2. Rate Limiting: The scraper includes automatic retry and backoff mechanisms
3. Post Limits: Set reasonable maxPosts limits to avoid timeouts

🔧 Technical Details

• Pagination: Automatic cursor-based pagination with configurable limits
• Date Chunking: Splits large date ranges into manageable chunks
• Error Handling: Exponential backoff and retry logic for transient failures
• Memory Efficient: Streams results to output as they're collected

📝 Notes

• Scrapes only public Facebook page posts
• Respects Facebook's rate limits with automatic throttling
• Requires valid configuration for operation
• Media URLs may have expiration times

🐛 Troubleshooting

No posts returned: Check that the page ID/URL is correct and the page is public

Rate limiting errors: Reduce postsPerPage or increase chunkSizeDays

Incomplete data: Some fields may be missing if not available in Facebook's response