Set up your internal PhantomBuster proxy to make the most out of your Facebook Phantoms! The first time you use your Phantom with a proxy you will likely be disconnected by Facebook as they will notice your IP address change. Not to worry - you will simply need to log into your Facebook account again to confirm your identity, setup your proxy, then relaunch your Phantom. After this, all of your Facebook Phantoms' launches will work smoothly.
Overview
- Proxies for Facebook Phantoms
- Using PhantomBuster’s built-in proxy
- Using Bright Data's proxy service
Proxies for Facebook Phantoms
PhantomBuster offers a built-in proxy to avoid errors that come from the lack of a proxy. Why is this? Well, websites such as Facebook closely monitor the location of your IP address(es). As our Phantoms run from the cloud, they could be connecting to your account from different locations around the world, which Facebook will quickly detect and consequently block the Phantom’s access. A proxy acts as an intermediary server and places your browser in a set geographical location to prevent Facebook from becoming suspicious.
Using PhantomBuster’s built-in proxy
Click on the Advanced settings in the left sidebar, and navigate to the Proxies tab:
In order for Facebook Phantoms to work successfully, we recommend setting the ''Proxy location'' to one that is actually closest to your actual geographical location. If you select "PhantomBuster proxy", you can click on the dropdown menu and choose the locations from the list that is closest to you (instead of setting it to Anywhere):
This means that all of your Phantoms’ logins are coming from the same place now, which is why once you’ve confirmed your identity Facebook will no longer flag the logins. You don't need to worry about changing any of the settings, as its been taken care of automatically (yay!).
Using Bright Data's proxy service
Activity rate limits
Don't forget that even with a proxy, you need to automate according to Facebook's rate limits. As well as location, Facebook keeps a close eye on your activity levels and, if too high, they will become suspicious of bot behavior. To avoid this, you should limit how much you do within a certain period of time - it's essential to be restrictive to prevent your cookies from expiring, and even your actions or account being blocked.
The limits are different for different types of actions, so we've gathered our recommendations for you to check in this article. You should also follow these best practices:
- Start out by automating slowly + warm up your account gradually.
- Spread your actions across multiple launches throughout the day.
- Keep your launches within daytime hours instead of having the Phantom run throughout the night.
To give you some examples, extracting profiles from a large list is fairly easy - the Facebook Group Members Export can extract up to 4000/5000 members from a group in one go. However, profile scraping is much more restrictive. As a maximum, we recommend scraping 5 profiles per hour with Facebook Profile Scraper.
If you think this article does not address your issue, please contact Support directly. We are continuously improving, so your feedback means the world to us!