Facebook Group members: what you can collect

Manycrawl can collect members of a Facebook group you belong to, as rows with name, profile link and bio. It collects what Facebook shows an ordinary member, which is only a part of a group. Read the limits before you build on it. It needs the desktop app.

How much of a group can you reach

Facebook never shows a group’s full member list. Manycrawl reads two lists: New members and Members with things in common. They barely overlap. In a test on a group of about 29,000 members, an ordinary member could reach roughly 15% of it, and very few of them listed a website or email in their bio. Expect roughly 10 to 20% of a large group, and almost no emails. We wrote up the measurement in What we measured in Facebook groups.

Collect members

On Home, under Sources, choose Facebook Group members.
Paste the Facebook group URL. Open the group in Facebook and copy the address.
Under Which members, keep New members (newest first) and Members with things in common ticked. Tick Admins & moderators too if you want them.
Set Max members (10 to 10,000, default 2,000). The limit is shared between the lists you tick.
Click Create & collect. If you are not logged in, a Facebook window opens. Log in once. The login stays on this computer, for your Manycrawl account.

What you get

Name, Facebook (profile link), Job Title, Company, School, Location, Website, Bio, Bio Type, Category, Followers, Verified, List (which list they came from), Recorded and FacebookId. Job title, company, school, location and website are read out of the bio text without AI, so they are filled only when the bio says it. Each new member is one action. Members are de-duplicated by their Facebook id.

Keep it up to date

In Automations you can turn on Auto-refresh and choose every day, 3 days or week. A scheduled check reads only the New members list, up to 300 people, in the background. The intervals are long on purpose, because checking Facebook often is a good way to get your account flagged. Check now runs it right away.

Be careful with your account

This reads Facebook as you, in Manycrawl’s own browser. The first run in a new install can trigger a Facebook checkpoint that asks you to confirm it is you. Do that when asked.
Collect at a gentle pace and not too often. Manycrawl waits a few seconds between steps.
Follow Facebook’s rules and your group’s rules about members’ data, and the privacy law that applies to you.

If it doesn’t work

“Facebook session expired — open this table and run it once to log in again.” Open the table, click Check now or Edit, and log in again.
“Paste a Facebook group URL (facebook.com/groups/…).” The address was not a group address.
“Pick at least one member list to collect.” Tick at least one box under Which members.
The log can say that scrolling stopped moving, which means the page may not have run out of members. Run it again later.