How I check who's in a Facebook group before I post in it
I make an export tool for this, so weigh the recommendation accordingly. Most of the method works without it, just slower, and I'll say where.
· 4 min read · This article is available in English only.
I make FB Extractor, which exports Facebook group member lists into a spreadsheet. So when I get to the part where I say "export the member list," read it with the suspicion it deserves.
The thing I keep running into, in my own posting and in what people email support about, is that nobody looks at a group before committing to it. You join, you post, you get three likes and a comment asking if this is spam, you move on. Three months later you've done that in eleven groups and you're fairly sure Facebook groups don't work.
Member count tells you almost nothing
Facebook puts two numbers on the card: how many members, how many posts a day. Both are the numbers that make a group look worth joining, which is presumably why they're the ones on the card. Neither says anything about who is in there.
The one I keep coming back to is the group for the gym I train at. Small local place. I'd been thinking of that group as members plus people weighing up a membership, because what else would it be. When I went through the export, a good part of it was other trainers, instructors from gyms down the road, a couple of people selling supplements. Obvious in hindsight, since trainers follow other gyms, but I'd have guessed wrong if you'd asked me the day before, and it changes what's worth posting there.
What I look at, when I can get it:
- What people put under Work. Self-reported and messy, a good few of them say things like "CEO at Myself", and it's still the fastest read on whether these are people who do the thing or people who find the thing interesting.
- Where they are. Groups that read as global are usually two or three countries wearing a trenchcoat.
- Join dates, when I bother. Two hundred people who joined the same week means something happened — a share, a giveaway, a merge — and that cohort tends to behave differently from everyone who came before it.
Education is in there too and I mostly ignore it.
Doing it by hand
You can open the member list and click through profiles, and for twenty or thirty people you should probably just do that instead of installing anything. Past that it falls apart, for a boring reason: there's nowhere to put what you find. I did it for a while with a notes file open beside the browser, and the notes file is the reason I stopped: I wrote in it for about three groups and never once went back and read it. What you're left with after an hour of clicking is a vague impression, which is what you had before you started, except now you're more confident about it. That's the actual failure mode here. Not that people can't check who's in a group, but that checking by hand produces something too soft to argue with later, so the impression hardens into a decision without ever passing through a step where it could have been wrong.
Where the tool comes in
Mine pulls the member list into CSV or XLSX. There's a second pass, off by default, that opens each member's About tab in a background tab and reads off Work, Education, City and Gender.
That second pass is slow on purpose. It waits somewhere between two and five seconds per person, so two thousand members is an hour or two of your laptop quietly doing this while you're elsewhere. I'm not going to make it faster. The randomness matters more than the length, incidentally — a loop that fires every 3.0 seconds exactly looks more like a script than one that's merely quick, which is the kind of thing you only learn by getting an account limited once. It's my account too. I test on it.
The free version stops at 200 members. That's a business decision, obviously, and if you're sizing up a 5,000-member group you're either working from a 200-person sample or paying me. A 200-person sample does answer "is this group my people," which is the only question this post is about, so I can live with where I put the line.
It doesn't collect emails or phone numbers, and won't.
Reading the spreadsheet without lying to yourself
Bucket by Work before you look at anything else. Crude buckets are fine: agency, in-house, student, unrelated, blank. Five minutes of sorting.
Blank is a category. If a third of the rows have nothing under Work, that's a third of the group you know nothing about, and it is very easy to build a confident picture out of the 67% you can see. I've done that and been wrong about a group because of it.
Then open ten profiles by hand and check them against their rows. Two minutes, and it's the cheapest way to notice that a bucket means something other than you assumed: that your "students" are mostly people finishing a six-week bootcamp, say.
The part that isn't about tooling
All of this reads what's already in front of you once you're in the group. Nothing gets bypassed, nothing hidden becomes visible, and the export can't reach anything you couldn't open yourself by clicking. Where it stops being audience research is the moment the spreadsheet turns into a cold outreach list, which is also roughly the moment tools like mine start getting pulled from the store. My interest here is not purely principled.
If you want the method without installing anything: open the member list, click thirty profiles, put the job titles in a text file, and this time actually read the file afterwards. The tool is for when thirty isn't enough.
FB Extractor is a Chrome extension that exports Facebook groups and group members to CSV or XLSX. Free plan included. See plans.