How to get the fans of any Facebook Page
And scrap their profile links. Takes 3 minutes, no coding.
You want the list of all the fans of a Facebook page.
In your Fb Ads, you can already target people by interests. But usually you cannot find the fans of any competitor, as Facebook doesn’t allow this for every page. This option is not available with the Facebook API neither.
But there are some alternative ways to do it.
Its easy and requires no coding. Lets go step by step:
Accessing any fan list
Lets say for the purposes of this article, that I want the fans of the Moroccan national airline company.
>> Get into the page you want to scrap.
The URL looks like this: https://www.facebook.com/RoyalAirMaroc/
The name “RoyalAirMaroc” is here to replace the actual ID associated with the business page. This URL link is created by Facebook to make it easier to find the company, but we cannot do anything with it.
To access the fans of that page, we have to find its Facebook ID.
There is a simple free tool allowing us to do that.
>> Copy the URL. Paste it here: https://findmyfbid.com/
In our example, the ID of Royal Air Maroc is:
We got it ! Now, take the ID number and insert it into this URL, in the place of the bold numbers :
https://www.facebook.com/search/143702195666976/likers?ref=about
>> Paste it in your browser. You got the list of all the fans of the page :)
Tip: for the scroll automation you can use Mouse Recorder. The old way.
Scrapping the list
Now, you want to do something with this list. There are several ways to scrap the data easily. But for legal purposes I cannot show you what to do with it.
Can give some usecase examples:
- Segment and target them on your Facebook Ads
- Send automated Messages (be cafeful with this)
- Get insights about the Markets targeted by competitors
- … be creative
But don’t be spammy, as it can backfire if used wrong. Not only because its against Facebook Terms, but also because nobody is waiting for you and your messages. Be smart and don’t annoy people ;)
That said, there are tons of tools online to get the names, links, geolocation, birth dates or whatever the public data you want.
I’ll show you the one I use. Up to you to find another one, like Scraper or Web Scraper, as mine is not free. Will explain further how to do it with a Javascript command, directly in your Chrome Browser.
My tool comes from a Nepalese startup: Grepsr.
Love their tool, it’s a simple Chrome addon allowing you to scrap easily any website and export the data in JSON or CSV. I use it as it can even get into the page links and look for additional data.
>> Open the addon.
>> Select the fields you’re interested in:
>> Then configure some options, like :
- Do you want text data (the names) or hrefs (page links) ?
- Do you need the scraper to get into every page to extract more data ? Grespr support this feature, not sure about the other tools.
- Want the whole list ? Select “this page has an infinite scroll” in our case
Now, just let magic happens :
Grouply as an alternative
As an alternative way for scraping you can use Grouply. It allows you to extract Facebook group members data, such as:
- First Name
- Last Name
- Company Position
- Company Name
- Profile URL
Follow this article for more information about the process.
Thats it !
We just scraped the fans of the biggest African airline company :p
Now, it’s up to you to export the data and play with it the way you want. To use it on your own Facebook Ads, follow the steps here to create a “Custom Audience” on FB Ads Manager.
Note that Facebook Ads doesn’t accept personal Facebook ID’s, unless you own the Page. You still can extract all the public information available (Name, Birth date, city, etc ..) and let Facebook match the data (his own data) with actual Profiles. You can download the Facebook file template here.
Tip: in case you do that often, or on a huge list.. my advice is to create a fake account and use a VPN. We can’t be too careful !
PS: you are a marketer or growth hacker and interested in Neuromarketing? You may love the Social intelligence tool we’re creating: Heedx. Subscribe to our beta testers list and get one year free ;)
Get in touch: amine@heedx.fr
Thanks for reading !
