Export Facebook Commenter User IDs — Download Every Numeric author_id to CSV & Excel (2026)

If you need to export Facebook commenter user IDs, the numeric author_id of every person who commented on a post, the platform gives you no button for it. This guide shows how to download every comment on a public post with the commenter's numeric ID in its own column, explains which "Facebook IDs" are not user IDs at all, and covers the one Excel setting that silently destroys them. It is for shops that match buyers across posts, giveaway hosts who allow one entry per person, and anyone moving commenters into a sheet or CRM.

Three things called "Facebook ID" that are not the same

Most confusion comes from mixing these up:

• The user ID. A number tied to one Facebook account for life, for example 61576238074081 or 100064720567123. It does not change when the person renames themselves or changes their username. This is what the export puts in author_id.
• pfbid codes. Long strings such as pfbid02Lki… that Facebook has used in post and photo links since 2022. They identify a piece of content, not a person. If you see one where you expected a user ID, the tool you used picked up the post link instead of the profile.
• App-scoped IDs. If you query the Graph API, Meta returns an app-scoped user ID, a number unique to your app. The same person has a different one in every app, so it will not match an ID from anywhere else.

Only the first is useful for recognising the same person across posts, files and tools.

What a numeric user ID looks like in 2026

Over the last 14 days the exporter returned 372,485 Facebook comments from 1,567 exports. The IDs fall into three shapes:

• 15 digits starting with 1000: about 68% of commenters. These are accounts opened roughly between 2009 and the early 2020s.
• 14 digits starting with 61: about 15%, the newest accounts.
• 9 or 10 digits: about 16%, the oldest accounts, from Facebook's early years.

A short ID is not broken or truncated. If your validation rule rejects anything under 14 digits, it is rejecting one commenter in six.

Downloading every commenter's ID in one file

1. Copy the link of a public post, Reel or video, or a post in a public group.
2. Paste it at the Facebook comment exporter. The comment count appears first; the first 100 comments are free, no signup.
3. Download Excel (.xlsx). Every row carries author (display name), author_id, text, created_at, id and reply_to_id, plus reaction counts.

For a list of posts, the bulk export takes up to 20 links in one paste and returns one file per post, which you can stack into one sheet and deduplicate on author_id.

Keeping 15-digit IDs intact in Excel

This is where IDs usually get damaged, and nobody notices until a match fails. Excel stores numbers with 15 significant digits, so when it reads a long digit string as a number it shows 1.00065E+14 and, for anything longer than 15 digits, replaces the last digits with zeros. Microsoft documents the behaviour in "Last digits are changed to zeros when you type long numbers in cells of Excel". User IDs are mostly 15 digits, so the display breaks first; comment IDs often run to 16 or 17 digits and lose real digits.

• Use the .xlsx download. The exporter writes IDs as text cells there, so every digit is kept and nothing turns into scientific notation.
• If you must use CSV, do not double-click it. In Excel use Data → From Text/CSV, choose Transform, and set author_id and id to Text before loading.
• Google Sheets keeps the digits on import but may show scientific notation; format the columns as Plain text.
• Never "fix" a column by changing its format afterwards. Once Excel has rounded a value, the lost digits are gone. Re-import from the original file.

Opening a profile from an ID

Put the number after https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id= and the link opens that account, whatever its current username. In a sheet, =HYPERLINK("https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id="&S2, "open") gives every row a clickable link. What you see on the profile still depends on the person's privacy settings; the ID only tells you whose profile it is.

What matching on the ID fixes

• Repeat buyers. Stack a month of order posts and count author_id. Your regulars stand out even when they comment under nicknames that change.
• One entry per person. In a giveaway, deduplicate on author_id, not on the name. Two people called "Ana Santos" stay two entries; one person with two name changes stays one. Our Facebook giveaway comments guide covers the rest of a fair draw.
• Blocklists. Keep a sheet of IDs who never paid or broke the rules, and check each new export against it with =COUNTIF(Blocklist!A:A, S2)>0.
• Order queues. Combine the ID with created_at to see who ordered first and who sent a second comment changing the order; see exporting Facebook comments in order.
• CRM records. The ID is a stable key. Store it next to the phone number or chat handle a customer gives you, and the next comment from them links back to the record.

Where the ID comes from, and when it is missing

The ID is read from the same public comment data a logged-out visitor's browser receives; nothing is guessed or looked up afterwards. In the 14-day sample, 3,121 of 372,485 comments (0.8%) came back from Facebook with no user ID. The comment text and time are still in the row. Match those by name, and do not treat the empty cell as an error in your formulas: wrap lookups in IF(S2="", "", …).

IDs on replies, Pages and admins

Not every row is a customer. A few cases to recognise before you count anything:

• Pages have IDs too. When a Page comments under its own post (a pinned price list, an order recap, "sold out"), the row carries the Page's numeric ID in author_id, usually in the same 15-digit 1000 shape as a person. Note your own Page's ID once and filter it out of every export.
• Admins posting as themselves show their personal ID, not the Page's. Keep a short list of staff IDs alongside the Page ID.
• Replies have reply_to_id filled in. The author_id on a reply is the person who replied, not the person they answered; to find who they answered, look up the row whose id equals the reply's reply_to_id.
• Tags are names, not IDs. When someone tags a friend, Facebook stores the friend as plain text in the comment. Only the commenter gets an ID.

Checking an ID list before you act on it

Before you send prizes, ship orders or block anyone on the strength of an ID column, run three quick checks. They take a minute and catch nearly every spreadsheet accident:

1. No scientific notation. Search the column for E+. Any hit means the file passed through a CSV double-click; re-import it.
2. No trailing zeros pattern. If many IDs end in 0 or 00, digits were probably rounded away. Real IDs end in any digit with roughly equal frequency.
3. Lengths make sense. =LEN(S2) should give 9, 10, 14 or 15 for almost every row. A column of 16-digit values is more likely the comment id than author_id.

Then spot-check two or three IDs by opening their profile link and confirming the name matches the author column. If those agree, the rest of the column is safe to act on.

What two weeks of Facebook exports showed us

This guide started with a customer who asked us to "retrieve the Facebook author_id in the current numerical format rather than the alternative format", pasting a pfbid string as the example of what they did not want. We checked their downloaded file and then every Facebook export from the previous two weeks:

• Zero pfbid values in the author_id column across all 372,485 rows. The pfbid they had seen came from a post link, not from a commenter, which is why the first section above separates the two.
• Their own example ID, 61576238074081, was already in their file, in the 14-digit "61" shape that newer accounts use.
• The damage happens after download. The ID was intact in the file; the risk is Excel's 15-digit limit when a CSV is opened by double-click, which is why the .xlsx stores IDs as text.

The column names and the share of each ID shape are live values from the product at the time of writing.

Handling commenter IDs responsibly

A user ID points at one real person, so treat the column as personal data. Collect it for a purpose you can state (fulfilling an order, running a fair draw, answering a customer), keep it only as long as that purpose lasts, and do not publish lists of IDs. Meta's Terms of Service govern how you use data from the platform, and if any commenters are in the EU, the GDPR principles of purpose limitation and data minimisation apply.

Download Facebook commenter IDs →

Related reading: exporting Facebook comments in order, exporting Facebook comments to Google Sheets, bulk exporting Facebook comments.