How to Export Facebook Contacts to Excel

Trying to get a list of your Facebook contacts into a neat Excel organizer can feel clunky, but it’s entirely possible. This guide will walk you through the exact steps to download your information directly from Facebook and transform that raw data into a clean, usable spreadsheet. We’ll also discuss what information you can realistically expect to get and how you can put it to use.

Why Export Your Facebook Contacts to Excel?

Transferring your contact list from a social media platform into a personal spreadsheet might seem like an extra step, but it gives you a level of ownership and flexibility you can't get within Facebook itself. Social media managers, entrepreneurs, and marketers often do this for a few key reasons:

• Creating a Master Contact List: It allows you to centralize your network. You can combine your Facebook connections with contacts from LinkedIn, your email, and your CRM to build a comprehensive networking database. This makes it easier to track relationships and identify outreach opportunities.
• Backing Up Your Network: Social media accounts can be suspended or hacked without warning. Having a separate backup of your hard-earned connections provides peace of mind and proves to be an invaluable resource if you ever need to rebuild your network from scratch.
• Audience Analysis: Once your contacts are in Excel, you can sort and filter them in ways Facebook’s interface doesn’t allow. You could, for example, sort by the date you became friends to see your networking patterns over time or cross-reference names with your professional contacts to spot overlaps.
• Personalized Outreach (Manually): While you can't automatically get email addresses and phone numbers anymore, an organized list of names serves as a foundation for manual outreach. You can go through your list and find key contacts to reconnect with on professional platforms like LinkedIn or via other channels you already have.

At its core, exporting your contacts is about taking control of your network data and making it work for you beyond the confines of a single platform.

A Quick Reality Check: What Contact Information Can You Actually Get?

Before we get into the "how-to," it’s important to set clear expectations. In the past, exporting your Facebook data might have given you access to friends' email addresses or phone numbers if they had made that information public. However, due to significant updates to privacy policies over the years (especially after events like Cambridge Analytica), this is no longer the case.

Today, you cannot export a clean list of your friends' email addresses or phone numbers from Facebook. Anyone promising a third-party tool that can scrape this information is likely violating Facebook's terms of service and potentially privacy laws.

So, what information will you get when you request your data? Your download will include a file dedicated to your friends list that contains:

• Full Name: The full name of each person on your friend list.
• Date of Connection: The timestamp of when you became friends with them.

You’ll also get separate lists for people you follow, pages you’ve liked, and friend requests you’ve sent or received. While it’s not the goldmine of contact info it once was, the list of names and connection dates is still a valuable asset for organizing and analyzing your professional network.

Step-by-Step Guide: How to Download Your Facebook Information

The process of getting your data from Facebook involves requesting a download from your account settings. This compilation can sometimes take a few hours or even a day, depending on how much activity your account has. Facebook will notify you when it's ready.

Step 1: Navigate to Your Settings & Privacy

Log in to your Facebook account on a desktop computer. Click on your profile picture in the top-right corner to open the dropdown menu, then select "Settings & Privacy" >, "Settings."

Step 2: Access the Accounts Center

On the left-hand menu, you’ll see a navigation pane. Look for the large "Accounts Center" box and click on the blue link that says "See more in Accounts Center." Meta has consolidated settings for Facebook, Instagram, and other Meta properties here.

Step 3: Go to "Your Information and Permissions"

Inside the Accounts Center, scroll down to the "Account Settings" section. Click on "Your information and permissions." This is where you can manage your data, activity history, and download settings.

Step 4: Find "Download Your Information"

On the next screen, click on the option that says "Download your information." This will take you to the data download request tool. You'll then be prompted to confirm which profile's data you want to download.

Step 5: Choose What Information to Download

Facebook allows you to choose between a complete copy of all your data (which can be huge) or a select few categories. To get just your contacts, it’s best to choose the latter.

1. Select "Download or transfer information."
2. Choose the Facebook profile you want to download information from and hit "Next."
3. Select "Some of your information." This lets you narrow down the download to only what you need.

From the list of information types, you'll want to select "Friends and followers." This category contains the list of your friends, people who follow you, and people you follow. Searching 'friends' in the search bar on this page makes this step a little faster. Once selected, click "Next."

Step 6: Finalize Your Download Preferences

In the final step, you define the settings for your downloadable file:

• Download to Device: Keep this option selected.
• Date Range: You can choose "All time" to get a list of all your friends since you created the account, or you can specify a date range. For a complete contact list, "All time" is best.
• Format: You have two choices: HTML or JSON. For easier pasting into Excel, select HTML. It’s visually organized and simpler to manage for non-developers.
• Media Quality: Since you’re not downloading a high volume of photos or videos, the Media Quality setting doesn’t impact your friends list much. You can leave this on "High" or change it if you wish.

After confirming your settings, click "Submit request." Facebook will start processing your file, and you will receive an email and a Facebook notification once it's ready to download.

Turning Your Raw Download into a Usable Excel Spreadsheet

Once you get the notification that your file is ready, you'll download a ZIP file. Your organized contacts list is just a few steps away.

Step 1: Unzip the File and Locate Your "friends.html" File

First, unzip the file or ‘extract’ the folder to a location on your computer that’s easy to find, like your desktop. Once you’ve opened the extracted folder, navigate through the subfolders to find your list. The path will usually be:

your_facebook_activity_folder_name >, friends_and_followers >, friends.html

This "friends.html" file is what we want. Don't double-click to open it in your browser yet. Instead, we'll open it directly with Excel.

Step 2: Import the HTML File Directly into Excel

This is a trick that most people don’t know. Excel can actually open HTML files and automatically parse their table structure into columns and rows.

1. Open a blank workbook in Microsoft Excel.
2. Go to File >, Open.
3. In the 'Open' dialog box, navigate to the folder where you saved your "friends.html" file.
4. By default, you might not see the file because Excel is looking for ".xlsx" files. To see it, click the file type drop-down (usually says "All Excel Files") and select "All Files (*.*)."
5. Now, your "friends.html" file should appear. Select it and click "Open."

Excel will instantly read the HTML and pull the data into two perfect columns: one for names and one for the date of your connection. You just skipped a lot of messy copy-and-pasting!

Step 3: Clean and Organize Your Data

The imported data is clean, but you can make it even better. Here are a few quick tips:

• Add Headers: Add clear headers to your columns, like "Name" and "Connection Date."
• Format the Date Column: The date column might come in a long text format. Select the entire column, right-click, choose "Format Cells," and select the "Date" category to display it in a cleaner format like "3/14/2012."
• Create Additional Columns: Create new columns for notes, such as "Company," "Followed Up By," "Industry," or "Platform Connected On" (e.g., in this case it’ll be ‘Facebook’). This turns your static list into a dynamic networking tool where you can track interactions.
• Freeze Panes: If your list is long, go to the "View" tab and select "Freeze Panes" >, "Freeze Top Row" to keep your headers visible as you scroll.

Final Thoughts

Exporting your contacts from Facebook to Excel is a simple process once you know the steps: request a specific portion of your data, download the HTML file, and open it directly with Excel. Although you won't get emails or phone numbers, this organized list of names serves as a valuable resource for backing up your network, doing audience analysis, and kickstarting outreach efforts.

We know tedious tasks like exporting contacts and switching apps can create a lot of friction in a marketer's day. At its core, that’s why we built Postbase. We designed it to be the one place where you can plan, schedule, engage, and analyze all your social media content without having to juggle browser tabs and spreadsheets. The goal is to minimize manual workflows and help you focus on the part that really matters: building and managing your online community from a single, streamlined dashboard.