A brand posts a layoff announcement. Within an hour the comment count is in the thousands. Half the reactions are Care emojis, half are Angry. The community team needs to know which voices are sympathy and which are backlash before they draft a single reply — and the only way to see that at the row level is to pull the comments out of Facebook and into a spreadsheet. This guide walks you through using ExportComments' Facebook Comments exporter to do exactly that, in Excel, CSV, or JSON.

Why export Facebook comments

Facebook's native comment view is built for browsing, not analysis. You can scroll, sort by Most Relevant or Newest, and click into a thread — but you can't filter by reaction type, you can't see the per-comment reaction breakdown, and you can't tell at a glance which comments are top-level versus nested replies. Once you've exported the comments to a spreadsheet you can do things the post UI hides:

  • Run brand-page comment moderation at scale — sort by reaction count, filter by attachment type, triage in batches instead of one-by-one.
  • Differentiate Page-level comments from comments on friend shares, which often surface very different sentiment from very different audiences.
  • Overlay reaction-type sentiment — Care versus Angry on a crisis post tells you sympathy versus backlash without reading a single line of text.
  • Run agency-side competitor monitoring across a portfolio of Pages, week over week.
  • Schedule a weekly export to Google Drive so the data is sitting there on Monday morning, ready to chart.
  • Build a reply-tree view of viral threads to find the comments that actually started the dogpile — the parent comment is almost never the loudest one.

Worth knowing: ever since Facebook locked down third-party comment access for non-Pages back in 2018, you can't just hit the Graph API as a regular user and walk away with comments. The exporter handles that for you for any public post.

How to export Facebook comments — step by step

Step 1: Grab the post URL

Open the Facebook post you want to export and copy its URL from the browser bar. Public Page posts, public Group posts, and public profile posts all work. The post needs to be visible without logging in — that's the public-content line.

Step 2: Paste the URL into the exporter

Head to the Facebook Comments exporter and paste the URL into the input field. If you have several posts to pull at once — say a week of brand posts, or a competitor's last ten — switch to bulk mode and paste one URL per line. Bulk runs return one file per URL, bundled together in a single ZIP at the end of the job, so each post stays cleanly separated.

Step 3: Pick a format

Choose Excel (.xlsx), CSV, or JSON. Excel is the right pick if you want to pivot, filter, and chart immediately. JSON is the right pick if you're piping the export into a notebook, a sentiment model, or your own dashboard.

Step 4: Start the export

Click Export. The job runs server-side, paginating through every comment and every nested reply on the post. Larger threads with tens of thousands of comments take a few minutes; you can close the tab and the file lands in your dashboard plus your inbox when it's done.

Step 5: Open the file

Open the .xlsx in Excel, Numbers, or Google Sheets and you're ready to filter, pivot, and chart. Each row is one comment, with the columns described in the next section.

Inside the export — what fields you get

Each row is a single comment or reply. You'll find columns for:

  • commenter_name — the public display name on the comment.
  • profile_url — direct link back to the commenter's Facebook profile or Page.
  • comment_text — the full body of the comment.
  • reactions — total count plus a per-type breakdown: Like, Love, Care, Haha, Wow, Sad, Angry.
  • reply_to_id — empty for top-level comments; populated with the parent comment's ID for nested replies, so you can rebuild the thread tree in a pivot.
  • created_at — original timestamp in UTC.
  • edited_at — last-edit timestamp if the commenter went back and changed their post, blank otherwise.
  • attachments — links to images, GIFs, stickers, or shared media attached to the comment.

Common workflows

  • Crisis-post sentiment overlay — pivot by reaction type on a single post. Care emoji on a layoff announcement reads as sympathy; Angry reads as backlash. The mismatch tells you who's siding with whom before anyone has read the comment text.
  • Brand-response audit — filter to comments where the commenter_name matches the Page name to see exactly how the social team replied, and which threads they left untouched.
  • Reply-tree mining on viral threads — group by reply_to_id to find the comment that actually triggered the dogpile. It's almost never the most-reacted top-level one.
  • Agency competitor monitoring — bulk-export a competitor Page's last 30 posts, then pivot total reactions and comment volume per post to find what worked. Schedule weekly to track the trend.
  • Edit-history forensics — sort by edited_at to surface comments that were rewritten — usually after the original got dragged in replies, sometimes after a brand reached out.
  • Attachment-driven moderation — filter to non-empty attachments to triage image and GIF replies, which are where most of the moderation problems on a viral post actually live.

Plan limits and API access

The Free tier returns up to 100 comments per export, which is enough to evaluate the format. Personal scales to 5,000 results per export, Premium to 50,000, and Business to 250,000 — enough to capture the comment thread on a fully viral brand post. If you'd rather pull comments on a schedule or trigger an export from your own pipeline, the same job is available through the REST API and via webhooks. See pricing for the full breakdown.

FAQ

  • Does this work on private posts or private Group posts?
    No. The exporter only works on publicly visible posts — anything that requires being logged in or being a Group member is off-limits.
  • Are reaction breakdowns per comment or just totals?
    Both. The reactions column gives you a total and a per-type split (Like, Love, Care, Haha, Wow, Sad, Angry) so you can pivot sentiment without re-fetching anything.
  • Can I see who reacted with which emoji?
    No. Facebook does not expose reactor identity per comment in the public surface. You get the per-type counts, not the per-user list.
  • Are nested replies included?
    Yes. Replies are returned alongside top-level comments and linked through the reply_to_id column so you can rebuild the full thread tree in a pivot.
  • Can I schedule a weekly export to Google Drive?
    Yes. Scheduled exports are available on Premium and Business and can write to Drive, Dropbox, S3, or your own webhook endpoint.
  • What if I have a long list of post URLs to export?
    Use bulk mode: paste one URL per line and the run returns one file per URL packaged in a single ZIP, so each post's data stays cleanly separated.