How to Get Personal Emails of FB Group Members of Competitors With Contactout

How to Get Personal Emails of FB Group Members of Competitors With Contactout

written by Houston Golden
Founder & CEO, BAMF Media
August 20th, 2019
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Wouldn’t it be great if you could get emails from Facebook groups of your competitors and throw them into your mailing list for cold emailing campaigns?

In this quick guide, we’ll show you how you can find the email addresses of any group on Facebook.

Why Scrape Emails?

Chances are, there are contacts in your competitor’s Facebook group that you haven’t been able to target yet. Being able to have their email allows you to target them on one of the most scalable marketing channels out there- email, and could mean added sales – if you play your cards correctly – for your team.

Besides, you’re also doing the market a favor.

Naturally, competition is good because you’re compelled to create better stuff for your market.

But, here’s the thing:

When you can put your products or services forward, you’ll also be able to give consumers choices. These choices allow them a better chance to get the product that they actually need.

Let’s look at a highly competitive niche, like web design. A lot of companies offer different types of plans for different kinds of intents and purposes.

There might be features that you are offering that are not available in your competitor’s groups, that a potential customer might need. Now would you let these members suffer because they aren’t getting the services that they need?

If you think about it, this is also what differentiates BAMF- we offer rapid growth as a service, as opposed to conventional digital marketing that most companies offer.

Step 1. Grabbing Emails from the Facebook Group

There are a lot of advertised tools out there, but we like to use the Phantombuster API because it is easy to use and we love the automation power.

If you do not have an account already, you can join for free for 14 days on https://phantombuster.com/register for 1 hour of API usage every day, which is more than enough for getting started. When you’re done creating your account, confirm it by going to your inbox and clicking on their verification link.

Next, you need to create a Google Sheet to list the groups that you need to scrape.

In this sheet, list down the Facebook URLs of the groups you want to scrape from in column A. Now make sure this sheet is public so that Phantombuster can access it.

Click “Share” on the upper right-hand corner, click “Get Shareable link”, click the dropdown to select “Anyone with the link can edit”, copy the link, and click “Done”.

, How to Get Personal Emails of FB Group Members of Competitors With Contactout

Next, go to https://phantombuster.com/apis#6987, to use their Facebook Group Extractor API. Once you’re done with that, click the three dots – “Configure me!” – to open their configuration options.

, How to Get Personal Emails of FB Group Members of Competitors With Contactout

Click on the option to the upper right, which allows you to install their chrome extension.

, How to Get Personal Emails of FB Group Members of Competitors With Contactout

You need to install this extension because Phantombuster requires session cookies for operation, and the extension will access it without you having to update it yourself in Phantombuster every time the API launches. This extension is important for the authentication and automation part.

, How to Get Personal Emails of FB Group Members of Competitors With Contactout

Put down the URL of the Google Sheet we asked you to make above and paste it into the field marked “Facebook Group URL / Spreadsheet URL.”

Click “Save,” this will take you back to the previous screen where you can now hit “Launch” so that you can start pulling information from your competitors’ Facebook groups.

, How to Get Personal Emails of FB Group Members of Competitors With Contactout

After the API runs, you can download a CSV file with the details of the group members.

  1. This API will give you details on:
  2. Facebook profile URL
  3. Profile picture URL
  4. The Facebook Unique ID for the user
  5.  First and Last Names
  6. Job titles

Upload this to another google sheet- we’ll be using it later on.

Now you can repeat this as many times as you want to pull data from any group that you wish to – provided that you have sufficient Phantombuster API execution time, and you’re a member of those groups.

Step 2. Use Phantombuster to Get LinkedIn Profile URLs

Next, you will want to go back to Phantombuster and use their LinkedIn Profile URL Finder.

Plug the editable version of the previous group members’ output sheet URL into the LinkedIn Profile Finder API, then fill in the appropriate column and CSV title.

Then hit Launch.

After it finishes processing the data, you’ll receive a list of LinkedIn URLs to download. Copy these URLs into your original Google Sheet. Use VLOOKUP to match the correct Facebook profiles to the correct LinkedIn profiles.

Step 3. Get Personal Emails Using Contactout

Next, have a virtual assistant use the Chrome extension and software, Contactout, to go through each LinkedIn profile to grab their personal email address and phone number (if available). Another way to do this is to plug the person’s name directly into Contactout’s dashboard.

This doesn’t always work depending on how common their name is – that’s why I use the Phantombuster -> LinkedIn URL strategy as well.

For these processes, you should get 60+ percent of their personal emails. Out of this 60 percent, you should get a 50 percent match rate when creating a custom audience.

That means if you scraped 1,000 people from a Facebook Group, you’ll have a custom audience of 300 to build a Lookalike audience from.

Keep in mind, Contactout recently released their paid plan. They have a backlog of over 10,000 requests to get it (they don’t even have a request button – you need to email them directly). As a result, it may take time to upgrade to get the paid version of 1,000 credits/month.

Nowadays when you get to the ContactOut registration page, you won’t even be given detailed information on pricing- just an option for you to try it out using a free account. The free account can only be used if you have a work email – so forget about using any email with @gmail in the suffix.

It’s still highly raved about by marketers and hirers, and you shouldn’t miss out.

As of the time of writing, their registration page was under some sort of maintenance, so we hope that you get through soon.

You can also avail of other applications that do this in bulk such as RocketReach. It has a functionality that allows you to paste a list of LinkedIn URLs to grab emails.

If you manage to be one of the few early adopters who get the paid version of Contactout, then take advantage of it as soon as possible. In the past, we’ve seen many tools like this get banned or acquired. That’s why competitive advantages when using online software don’t last forever.

If you’re just looking to collect emails from your own Facebook Group that your run or help manage, this isn’t the best route.

You can implement a feature where participants must answer several questions to join your group. You can get their LinkedIn profile, email, domain name, and more.

In this example, I attempt to join the Facebook Group, Under 30 Nomads. I receive a notification to fill out several questions to join:

, How to Get Personal Emails of FB Group Members of Competitors With Contactout

I click “Answer Questions,” then I see this:

, How to Get Personal Emails of FB Group Members of Competitors With Contactout

They ask several questions to see if the person interested in joining is the right fit. You could add one more question asking for a LinkedIn profile or email.

If your Facebook Group has strong engagement and many backlinks (that help it rank when people search for groups in your niche), then you can receive a flood of new emails.

Keep in mind LinkedIn profiles almost guarantee you’ll retrieve their email when you use tools like Clearbit, Email Hunter, or Toofr. So, if you find asking for email deters too many people from joining, then just ask for their LinkedIn profile URL.

If having a Facebook Group as part of your strategy for attracting new leads, then this two-step Facebook Group tactic is one of the fastest ways to start gathering emails organically. Moreover, it will give you a better idea of the makeup of your target customers so that you can market to them better.

Start Extracting Today!

If you want to be able to increase your market share, you’ve got to be able to utilize every method available to reach out to people. Each industry is getting more competitive as we speak and we can bet that if your competitors came across this, they’d be trying it out to leverage against you.

However, there’s more.

You don’t just have to use these tools on your competitors alone. There are plenty of ways you can leverage this on groups that sell a complementary product or service that can partner with yours, a knowledge hacking forum, or even other markets with totally unrelated interests that you want to penetrate.

Use these hacks today.

They’re tough to come by, won’t last forever and you don’t want to miss out!

Image Source: Tanya denysenko, Dribbble

About the Author

The name's Houston Golden. I'm the Founder & CEO of BAMF — a company I've grown from $0 (yes, really) to well over $5M+ in revenue over a span of 5 years.

How did I do it? Well, it's quite simple, really. I've helped hundreds of business owners and executives get major traction (because when they win, we win), I tell all on this blog.

Growth hacking is a state of mind. Follow along as I explore and expose the unknown growth strategies and tactics that will change the way you think about marketing.
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3 comments

  • Avatar for Houston

    i use groupninja it’s simple chrome extension no registration just get started have you tried it?

  • Avatar for Houston

    Interesting article, thanks for the detailed explanation of these hacks.

    I fully understand you are only giving off information which some people might find very valuable. I am just curious if the instructions you gave are followed, are the contact emails downloaded GDPR compliant or would reaching out professionally to these people on my companies behalf, put my company at risk?

  • Avatar for Houston
    Anton Gerrits

    I don´t get it. I want to substract email from my facebook group. I downloaded the CSV file but that is empty. At the same moment, my facebook account account was blocked for an illegal attempt from Montreat to enter my account.
    I your article, I read all, but after you write “Upload this to another google sheet- we’ll be using it later on”, I don´t read anything to extract the email addresses….
    Is all fake what you wrote?

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