This automation is potentially for you, if:
- Y9u run a Facebook group, or at least have some admin privileges that lets you into the Member Requests section, and…
- This group asks potential new members questions before they join, and…
- You would like to record the answers to these questions in a spreadsheet automatically (instead of doing copy and paste, or taking a screenshot, or whatever else)
Before using this Sheets Genie Project Template
- Verify that you have access to Sheets Genie and that you can get it to work for you (follow the Getting Started steps for this to prove you can run an example)
- Running a generic Sheets Genie example is important, because this is a Facebook Project Template, and Facebook regularly changes its HTML and markup on the page, meaning…
- If this Facebook Project Template isn’t working properly for you, it might be because Facebook has updated its page structure, and so the template’s current value selectors aren’t working as a result
- I will try to update the template’s value selectors if this happens, but your best option is to learn how to fix broken automations when this occurs, so that you are in the ultimate power position (with a little knowledge, you gain a lot of power)
How this Sheets Genie Project Template works for Facebook Group Questions & Answers
- You click here to make a copy of the Sheets Genie Project Template for Facebook Group Questions & Answers
- You edit your copy to supply the members requests Facebook url of the Facebook group for which you want to collect responses to questions (see picture below for this step)
- You have access to this url due to appropriate admin privileges
- You edit the value selectors in the Sheets Genie project template sheet so that it can identify the appropriate Facebook membership question / response for each question
- I’ve only tested this on questions with written responses, so I don’t know how well this works with other kinds of Facebook membership questions
- You run the task (Task A) in the Control Center of your Sheets Genie sheet that you have set up and edited
- It pulls in the info for current / pending Facebook member requests including:
- Name of person
- Unique url associated with this person for the group
- Response to question 1 (if answered)
- Response to question 2 (if answered)
- Response to question 3 (if answered)
- As far as I know, there is no way to currently make responses to questions mandatory, so if it’s not pulling in responses, it might simply be that the people didn’t answer those questions
Identify your target Facebook group member requests url and verify you have access
My members requests url for my Sheets Genie group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/sheetsgenie/member-requests
Yours will be different, but you can probably use that example url structure to figure it out fast.
Also, for my Sheets Genie group, I’m able to find pretty much any Facebook group admin links at the following kind of url structure:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/sheetsgenie/edit
Identify the questions you want to collect answers for
I found my Facebook membership questions at: https://www.facebook.com/groups/sheetsgenie/membership_questions
Your url will obviously be different, buy you can probably use that structure example to figure it out fast.
Notice the following about my questions below:
- They are all of the type Questions / Written Answer
- So I don’t know how well this Sheets Genie Project Template will work with other types of questions
- Notice also the beginning of my questions, which is how I will target them and their responses later with value selectors
- ‘Want a free code’ for Question 1
- ‘How did you hear’ for Question 2
- ‘What is your wish’ for Question 3
How to edit your copy of the Sheets Genie Project Template for Facebook Group Questions
Identifying your questions in the step above is important, because it helps you collect responses in the following way depicted below:
- After you set up your members requests url in the “start” field in your “Control Center” sheet…
- You will edit your valueSelectors field so that the selectors target your specific questions (not mine)
- The main reason for targeting selectors in this advanced way, instead of a more generic selector setup:
- Facebook changes their markup regularly
- This helps future-proof this automation a bit for changes Facebook might make
- Even if it stop working, it will be faster / easier to fix your valueSelectors setup via this kind of targeting…
- Especially since this kind of targeting naturally provides a great deal of built-in clarity of what you want to target