How to Extract Member Emails from Facebook and LinkedIn Groups?
Facebook and LinkedIn are two social media platforms that, together, have millions of groups spanning every industry, interest, hobby, profession, and geography that you can imagine.
If you are a marketer, sales rep, or small business owner looking to sell a product or land new clients through a cold outreach campaign, then these two platforms are nothing short of a goldmine of information for you.Â
In fact, the only websites that might contain a more extensive cache of varied interest groups are Google and Reddit. Unfortunately, Reddit is anonymous, which makes it hard to generate leads and find clients. Google, on the other hand, is unstructured, and does not make it easy for users to organize themselves into specific interest groups.
Article by Philip Ilic, Linkedin Ads Specialist.
How to Extract Member Emails from Facebook and LinkedIn Groups?
Facebook and LinkedIn are two social media platforms that, together, have millions of groups spanning every industry, interest, hobby, profession, and geography that you can imagine.
If you are a marketer, sales rep, or small business owner looking to sell a product or land new clients through a cold outreach campaign, then these two platforms are nothing short of a goldmine of information for you.Â
In fact, the only websites that might contain a more extensive cache of varied interest groups are Google and Reddit. Unfortunately, Reddit is anonymous, which makes it hard to generate leads and find clients. Google, on the other hand, is unstructured, and does not make it easy for users to organize themselves into specific interest groups.
Article by Philip Ilic, Linkedin Ads Specialist.
Using Social Media Groups to Find Your Ideal Clients
Thankfully, Facebook and LinkedIn have you covered on both these fronts. They have millions of users organized into highly specific interest groups – making it easy for you to find a large number of people who match your ideal client profile, all gathered in one place.
For instance, if you have a company that sells aftermarket parts for motorcycles and bikes, you can join a Facebook group of dirt bike enthusiasts. On the other hand, if you’ve developed a new app for online hotel booking, you might want to join a LinkedIn group created for professionals in the travel and hospitality industries.
Such groups provide you with an opportunity to find new leads for your business, and to initiate organic interactions with those prospects.
Furthermore, you can also use the LinkedIn and Facebook groups to extract the email addresses of potential clients and customers, for your cold outreach campaign.
In this way, you can build an email list of prospective clients who have a high likelihood of being interested in your offer, since they are already involved in a group related to your product or service.
For instance, someone who is deeply engaged with a dirt biking Facebook group would be more likely to read an email talking about your cutting-edge folding brake levers, than a random person whose email address you found on a purchased email list.
So far, so good.
But how do you actually go about finding the email addresses of the members of these groups? After all, some of the most popular Facebook and LinkedIn groups have thousands of members. You certainly can’t manually check all their profiles to find the information you need.
Well, that’s where web scraping tools can come in handy. We will discuss some of these tools in detail, later in the article. They can help you extract the names, job titles, and email addresses of hundreds or thousands of members in any Facebook or LinkedIn group, within a matter of minutes.
You can then use this information to land new clients and grow your business, by sending personalized emails to each of the group members.
So, let’s dive straight in and learn about the different tools you can use to extract emails from Facebook and LinkedIn groups.
Tools You Need to Extract Emails from a Facebook Group
With an average open rate of 21.80 percent across all industries, email is an incredibly powerful sales and communication channel for businesses of all kinds.Â
Facebook and LinkedIn groups can work as an accurate signal of intent for their members. Meaning that if someone is a part of a group related to a topic, hobby, or industry, then you can safely assume that they would have at least some interest in an email that talks about that hobby or industry.
This obviously makes them the perfect audience for a cold email campaign, if you are selling a relevant product or service.
So, let’s take a look at the tools that you will need, in order to kickstart your cold email marketing efforts with a list of prospects who already have interests that are relevant to your business.
PhantomBuster
PhantomBuster is an online tool that allows salespeople and marketers to extract the data they need from the internet, automate online tasks, and make the process of lead generation smoother and faster.
After signing up to PhantomBuster, you will need to use a few different ‘phantoms’ or automations to extract all the email addresses from a given Facebook or LinkedIn group.
You can link the different automations together to create sequences, such that the data scraped by one phantom will be automatically fed into the next one, which will use it to scrape even more information. This increases the speed and efficiency of the entire process.
Using PhantomBuster to Extract Emails from Facebook Groups
The three different phantoms that you will be using to get data from a Facebook group are as follows:
- Facebook Group Extractor
- LinkedIn Profile URL Finder
- LinkedIn Profile Scraper
These phantoms will work together to scrape the Facebook group of your choice, find the names, emails, and other relevant information about all (or most) of the members, and to then create a CSV file with all this information arranged in a way that is usable and easy to understand.
To make the most of these useful automations, you must first sign up to PhantomBuster and verify your email address. Make sure you’re logged into your Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, before you begin the process of extracting emails. Lastly, click the link at the top of the website to install the PhantomBuster Chrome extension.
You’re now ready to get started with the phantoms!
Step 1: Use the Facebook Group Extractor Phantom
- From the website header, click on the dropdown list titled ‘Phantoms’.
- Choose ‘all categories’ from the dropdown list, then go to the sidebar and select ‘Facebook’.
- The Facebook Group Extractor phantom will be right at the top of the page. Now, you just have to click on the button that says ‘Use this Phantom’.
- If you’re logged into Facebook and LinkedIn, and have installed the PhantomBuster Chrome extension, you will now be asked to connect your PhantomBuster account to Facebook.
- After connecting to Facebook and clicking ‘save’, you will be taken to a page titled ‘Groups to Scrape’.
- In this page, you should paste the URL of the Facebook group that you want to ‘scrape’ for members’ data.
- The next step is to fill in the ‘behavior’ metrics. In other words – how many members’ data you want to scrape from each group, and how many groups you want to process per launch?
- If you leave these fields blank, then the phantom will just scrape all the available data.
- Below, you will be asked to give a customized name to your result file (CSV). You may also opt to remove duplicate profiles from the file, if you’re scraping multiple groups at once.
- You will then be taken to the ‘Settings’ page, where you will have to choose between a manual launch or repeated launches throughout the day. If you are trying to scrape a small Facebook group (less than 1,000 people), then a manual launch would suffice. However, if you’re scraping a large group (over 100,000 people) or multiple groups, then you should opt for repeated launches.
- Choose to be notified only if there is an error in the scraping process.
- Save your settings and launch the Facebook Group Extractor.
- A few minutes later, you will be able to download a CSV file with the profile URLs, names, profile pictures, and other data of all the group members.
- If the phantom gets kicked out of Facebook before it has scraped all the member profiles, you might need to use a proxy and then repeat the whole process.
Step 2: Use the LinkedIn Profile URL Finder Phantom
- Once you have finished using the Facebook Group Extractor phantom, scroll down until you see the link ‘See compatible Phantoms’ on the right sidebar.
- In the next page, choose the LinkedIn Profile URL Finder phantom. Click on the button that says ‘Use this Phantom’.
- You will then have to click on ‘My Phantoms’ and choose the CSV file obtained from the Facebook Group Extractor phantom.
- Click save. In the next page, leave all the ‘behavior’ fields empty.
- You can choose to enable the ‘turbo mode’ in order to make the phantom faster.
- In the ‘Settings’ page, choose to launch the phantom manually, if there are around a thousand people on your CSV file. You can opt for repeated launches if you have hundreds of thousands of profiles to get through.
- Opt to be notified only in case of an error. Click save.
- In the next page, launch the LinkedIn Profile URL Finder phantom.
- A few moments later, the phantom will have finished its task and you will have your second CSV file. This file will contain the LinkedIn profile URLs of all the people in your original Facebook group.
Step 3: Launch the LinkedIn Profile Scraper
- Scroll down until you find the ‘see compatible phantoms’ link once again. Click on it.
- Among the featured phantoms that come up, choose the ‘LinkedIn Profile Scraper’ phantom.
- Click on the button that says ‘connect to LinkedIn’, which should happen immediately if you are logged into your LinkedIn account. Click save.
- Click on ‘My Phantoms’ and choose the CSV file you obtained from running the previous phantom – LinkedIn Profile URL Finder. Click save once again.
- Next, you’ll be taken to the ‘Behavior’ section of this phantom. Here, you can check the advanced settings, and choose the options that are relevant to you.
- For instance, you can choose to collect data on the licenses and certifications of each person whose profile you are scraping. This might be helpful in adding some personalization to your cold email campaign. You might start off the email by congratulating the recipient for a certification that they have recently received, to stand out from other businesses sending out mass emails.
- Once you’ve filled out all the relevant fields in the ‘Behavior’ section, click save.
- In the next section, you will be asked to select your email discovery service. Options include Hunter.io, Dropcontact.io, Snov.io, and more. We typically recommend Hunter.io to beginners, but you can use any of the options that you’re comfortable with.
- You will then be asked to get the API key of your email discovery service and paste it in the correct field. Once you’ve done this, click save.
- In the settings page, choose whether you want to launch the phantom manually or repeatedly. Choose to be notified in case of error and click save.
- Finally, launch the LinkedIn Profile Scraper phantom and download the CSV file. This file will contain the email addresses (and other professional information) collected from the LinkedIn profiles of all the Facebook group members.
- In case this process does not work, you might have to use one more phantom to complete the sequence. This is known as the LinkedIn Companies Info phantom. However, if you follow the above-mentioned steps properly, this phantom might not be necessary.
Extracting Emails from a LinkedIn Group
PhantomBuster also offers the LinkedIn Group Members phantom, which can help you extract the emails of up to 2,500 members of any LinkedIn group.
People typically join LinkedIn groups for professional growth and insight. So, this is a good way to acquire the email addresses of many people working in the same industry, or at different levels of the same organization.
If you are trying to sell a product or service that would be useful to companies or professionals in a single industry, then this phantom might prove invaluable for you.
Here are the steps you’ll have to follow, to make the most of this phantom.
- Go to the PhantomBuster website and click on the dropdown list titled ‘Phantoms’, which you will find on the website header.
- From the dropdown list, click on LinkedIn.
- You will be taken to a page full of LinkedIn phantoms. Scroll down until you find the ‘LinkedIn Group Members’ phantom, and click on it.
- In the next page, simply click the button that says ‘connect to LinkedIn’. But make sure you’re already logged in to your LinkedIn account before this step.
- Now, you’ll have to enter the URL of the LinkedIn group you want to scrape. If you want to scrape more than one group at the same time, then you can put a list of your chosen groups into a publicly available CSV file and enter that URL, instead.
- However, you will only be able to use this phantom to scrape a LinkedIn group that you’re already a part of. So, make sure to join the group that you want to scrape, before you begin the process.
- If you’re trying to scrape multiple groups with a CSV file, then click on the ‘spreadsheet settings’ to tell the phantom which column has the group URLs that it needs to run. Click save.
- In the Behavior section, you can choose how many group members you want the phantom to scrape per launch. Ideally, you shouldn’t scrape more than 2,500 group members in a single day.
- You can choose to remove duplicate profiles if you’re scraping more than one group at a time.
- Rename the CSV file that will contain your results, so as to make it easy to find. Then click save.
- On the ‘Setup’ page, you can choose to either launch the phantom manually or repeatedly throughout the day, depending on how many groups you’re trying to scrape and how many members each group has.
- Next, choose to get notified in case of an error, and click save.
- The LinkedIn Group Members phantom should now be ready to launch.
- Once the launch is complete, download the CSV file containing the results. It should contain information like profile URL, first name, last name, and more.
- To convert this information into email addresses, you’ll have to use an email discovery service like Snov.io, Hunter.io, etc.
- Login to your email discovery service of choice, then go to ‘Tools’ and choose the option for ‘social URL search’.
- Now, you should be able to add the CSV file that you obtained by using the LinkedIn Group Members phantom.
- Once the CSV file has been uploaded, click on the ‘start search’ option.
- After the search is complete, click ‘open list’, and you will be able to see all the email addresses that have been found by the tool.
- Now, you simply need to export this list of email addresses, save it, and upload it to the email software you typically use for your cold outreach campaigns.
Using the Emails You’ve Found
By the time you’re done with this entire process, you should have at least a few hundred email addresses of prospective clients and customers.
And this is when you must be extremely careful. Knowing about the effectiveness of cold emails as a marketing tool, it can be quite tempting to shoot out the first batch of emails as soon as possible – now that you have so many potential leads to choose from.
But cold email campaigns work best when they are optimally personalized for each recipient. And the benefit of using a web scraping tool like PhantomBuster is that it gives you a plethora of information about each prospect, including their Facebook and LinkedIn URLs, first and last names, licenses and certifications, job titles, and much more.
So, why not put all this data to good use and personalize each email? This will minimize the risk of your domain being flagged for spam, and will increase the chances of your emails being opened and read by the recipients.
So take your time, and make the most of all the data you’ve just obtained from PhantomBuster. A little patience will help you land more clients, sell more products, and earn you far better results in the long run.
Philip Ilic | B2B Growth Specialist
Phil helps B2B SaaS companies with growth marketing and is a deep specialist in Linkedin advertising and paid social more generally (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn). He runs a paid social agency called Superlumen.co and is the founder of B2Bhero.co.
0 Comments
Trackbacks/Pingbacks