With over 2 billion monthly active users, Facebook is one of the largest social media platforms in the world. As such, it contains a vast amount of data that can provide useful insights for businesses, marketers, and regular users alike. Luckily, Facebook makes it possible to export much of your Facebook data into a Excel spreadsheet for further analysis.
Exporting Facebook data to Excel allows you to view and analyze your Facebook activities, posts, friends, ads, etc. in ways that are not possible within Facebook itself. With the data in Excel, you can create pivot tables, charts, calculate statistics, sort, filter and much more. This gives you the flexibility to slice and dice the data however you want in order to uncover trends and insights.
In this comprehensive guide, we will walk through the entire process of exporting your Facebook data to Excel step-by-step.
Contents
- What Facebook data can you export to Excel?
- Why export Facebook data to Excel?
- Step 1 – Request your Facebook data
- Step 2 – Select data types to download
- Step 3 – Download your Facebook data
- Step 4 – Locate theJSON files
- Step 5 – Convert JSON to Excel
- Step 6 – Analyze Facebook data in Excel
- Limitations and considerations
- Conclusion
What Facebook data can you export to Excel?
Facebook allows you to download and export the following types of personal data to Excel spreadsheets:
- Posts
- Comments
- Reactions to your posts
- Friends list
- Messages
- Groups
- Events
- Pages you manage
- Ads
- Payments
- Location history
- Facial recognition data
- Search history
This covers a wide range of Facebook activities and data generated by your account. With all this data in Excel, you can analyze your usage patterns, social connections, posting performance, ads, locations visited and more.
Why export Facebook data to Excel?
Here are some of the key reasons why you may want to export your Facebook data to Excel:
- Perform custom analysis – Excel provides advanced analytical capabilities like pivot tables, sorting, filtering and formulas which allow you to analyze Facebook data in ways not possible on Facebook itself.
- Identify trends and insights – You can analyze performance over time, find correlations, highlight patterns in usage and engagement etc. to uncover actionable insights.
- Integrate with other data – Bringing Facebook data into Excel allows you to combine it with data from other sources like Google Analytics, financial data etc. for integrated analysis.
- Visualize data – Charts and graphs in Excel provide powerful visualizations for understanding Facebook data.
- Find conversation starters – Analyzing messaging data can uncover common discussion topics to rekindle stalled conversations.
- Review ads performance – Ad data in Excel can be analyzed to find highest/lowest performing ads, optimize spend etc.
- Backup data – Excel provides a handy backup of your Facebook data for redundancy.
Step 1 – Request your Facebook data
The first step is to request Facebook to create an archive of your account data. Here is how to do it:
- Go to the Facebook Settings page and click on the “Your Facebook Information” tab.
- Under the “Download Your Information” section, click on the “View” button.
- This will take you to the “Download Your Information” page. Click on the “Create File” button.
Facebook will now start creating an archive of your data which may take a few minutes to many hours depending on how much data your account has.
You will receive a notification on Facebook when your download archive is ready. The archive will be available for download for a few days.
Step 2 – Select data types to download
By default, Facebook includes all data types when creating your download archive. However, if you want to be selective and only download certain types of data, you can customize it when requesting the download.
When you click the “Create File” button, you will see a popup with various data types that can be included in the download archive:
- Posts
- Photos and videos
- Comments
- Likes and reactions
- Friends
- Followers
- Messages
- Groups
- Events
- Marketplace
- Location history
- Search history
- Ads
- Apps and websites
- Pages
- Payment history
Review the list and toggle on/off the data types you want to include or exclude from the download.
Step 3 – Download your Facebook data
Once the Facebook data archive has been created, you will receive a notification saying it is ready to download.
To download it:
- Go back to the “Download Your Information” page in Facebook settings.
- Locate the pending data archive and click the “Download” button.
- This will download a ZIP file containing your Facebook data to your computer.
Note that the ZIP file can be quite large depending on the amount of data in your account. The size is displayed before you download it. Ensure you have enough free space on your computer.
Step 4 – Locate the JSON files
The ZIP file contains your Facebook data stored in JSON format across various files and folders. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight file format that is easy for computers to parse and process.
Here are some key folders containing JSON files you can export to Excel:
- posts – Contains JSON files with your posts data
- comments – Your comments on posts
- reactions – Reactions to your posts
- friends – Your friends list
- messages – Your Facebook messages
- events – Events you responded to
- ads – Ads data
- location_history – Locations you checked into or were tagged at
- search_history – Record of your searches
- payment_history – Your payments data
You may also find other JSON files like groups, marketplace etc. depending on the data types you requested.
Step 5 – Convert JSON to Excel
To analyze the data in Excel, the JSON files need to be converted into the XLSX format. Here are two options to convert them:
Use online JSON to Excel converter
Many free online tools exist that can convert JSON to Excel. Some popular options:
To use them:
- Go to the converter website and upload the JSON file.
- The tool will convert the JSON data to Excel format.
- Download the converted XLSX file to your computer.
Repeat this for other JSON files you want to convert.
Use Excel Data import
Alternatively, you can also directly import the JSON file into Excel.
- Open a new blank Excel workbook
- Go to Data > Get Data > From File > From JSON
- Browse and select the JSON file to import
- In the query editor, select the columns you want to import and load it into a worksheet
This avoids having to convert the files separately. Repeat for other JSON files.
Step 6 – Analyze Facebook data in Excel
With the Facebook data now available in Excel format, you can start analyzing and visualizing it using Excel’s full capabilities.
Here are some analysis ideas to get you started:
- Use pivot tables on post data to analyze likes, comments and share numbers for different post types over time.
- Create charts to visualize most liked and shared post types or most engaging post times.
- Use COUNTIF or other formulas to analyze how many posts contain certain words, hashtags etc.
- Analyze friend list data by location, gender, date added etc.
- Mine messages data for common keywords or conversation topics.
- Use location history data to map out places visited.
The options for analysis using Excel tools like formulas, filtering, pivot tables and charts are endless. Some key things you can uncover include:
- When your followers are most active
- Your most engaging post types and topics
- Popular commenters on your posts
- Common friends between you and others
- Frequency of interactions with friends
- Your most visited locations
This is just a small sample – with some creativity you can gain many other insights from your Facebook data in Excel.
Limitations and considerations
While exporting Facebook data to Excel is easy and enables powerful analysis, keep these limitations in mind:
- The download only includes data from your personal profile, not others’ data.
- Data is limited to what Facebook permits for download.
- Private messages from other users are excluded.
- The download excludes data from Messenger and Instagram even if linked.
- Facebook may block excessive downloads if done too frequently.
- Blank cells or errors may need cleaning in Excel before analysis.
Additionally, be mindful of analyzing other users’ data without consent. The purpose should be to gain insights about your own activities and engagement on Facebook.
Conclusion
Analyzing Facebook data in Excel opens up many interesting insights into your activities, engagement, connections, interests and usage patterns. The steps to export data from Facebook to Excel are relatively simple but enable very powerful analysis and visualizations using Excel’s tools.
Hopefully this guide has provided you a strong overview of the entire process from downloading your data all the way to analyzing it in Excel. While the volume of data in the Facebook download archive may seem overwhelming at first, taking time to dissect it can uncover highly useful insights for your business, marketing or personal purposes.
So don’t be afraid to dive in, and you may just find insights about your Facebook presence you never knew before!