Collecting Data from Facebook Group

Question

I'm not one of the Facebook Developer, but I need some data for my thesis, regarding one group in Facebook which I'm currently observing.

The problem is, I must collect the data within the last 6 months of:

• how many members have joined in the last 6 months, if possible, can be split by monthly.
• how many postings in the group in the last 6 months, also.. if possible split by monthly
• how many active users within the last 6 months.

Can somebody give me some hints of how to collect those information?

Answer 1

You're going to have a hard time doing this. Groups aren't very API friendly, and they don't have their own insights information.

You can try browsing the group's feed using the Graph API Explorer using the /GROUP_NAME_OR_ID/feed edge, and adding since and until filters to look at monthly data.

However, you won't see all the posts because of Facebook privacy filtering. To get the most reliable data, you'll need to manually count the entries of interest from within the Facebook webapp.