tools – Norah Abokhodair

It is finally here… I am happy to announce that my Facebook Post Browser tool can now help you browse Facebook Pages.

In the past few months I received many comments from researchers and students who work on research related to Facebook users asking me to improve the tool to browse Facebook Pages in addition to Facebook open Groups. With this new update it will be simple to see all the posts of a Facebook Page for the time range you set. Here is how you can use the tool for pages:

1- Go to http://groupbrowser.azurewebsites.net/

2- you will login with your Facebook account credentials and get to this page

3- From the drop-down menu select Page

4- Enter the name of the page you are interested in browsing

Tip: I usually find the name of the page in the URL

5- Select the data range of the posts you would like to retrieve

6- Finally, press submit and wait for a few seconds for the results.

I hope this is beneficial for many of you conducting research on Facebook Groups and Pages.I would like to hear your opinion, so please share your comments and feedback regarding this tools.

** Copyright: If you are planning to use this tool in your publishable research I would appreciate it if you can reference the tool/blog in your reference list. The citation style will be for a “website” and the author is Abokhodair, N.

I am sure many of you would like some help scraping – scraping is a technique of extracting information from websites – the posts of a specific Facebook group. For example, when I was working on one of my early projects entitled Youth, ICTs, and Democracy in Egypt with the Technology & Social Change Group (TASCHA) at the UW – Information School, we needed to undergo a qualitative coding exercise for approximately 700 Facebook posts from the April Youth Movement Facebook group. However, at the time of data collection, Facebook’s format did not enable users to browse through old posts. Additionally, the number of daily posts was immense; manual collection would have been prohibitively time-consuming. Therefore, I quickly realized the need for an application to save me time while collecting Facebook posts. In order to collect Facebook posts, we developed an application using the Facebook Graph application programming interface (API), which is a way for developers to access Facebook data and build applications.

This is the link to the application http://groupbrowser.azurewebsites.net/

How to Use the Application:

1. At the beginning Log in with your Facebook account.

2. After logging in, add the name of the Facebook group that you want to extract the posts from ( I recommend copying it from Facebook)
3. Add the start Date of the posts you want to display
4. Add the end Date of the posts you want to display
5. Add the Number of posts
6. Click Submit

The results are going to show in a bulleted list for readability and ease of use.

I really hope you could benefit from using this free application and feel free to ping me if you had any questions or concerns. Also, I would like to hear from you, what do you think of the App ? Would it be beneficial for you ?

Update: I just published a new post for the Facebook Page Scrapper!