Facebook said the group posted 5x a day. The real number was 13 a month.

I've been looking for the first users for a price-history tool I built, and I picked Facebook groups because they looked free and well-targeted. Three weeks later I have almost nothing to show for it. But I did learn one thing worth passing on.

Facebook's group search numbers are not reliable, and I built my whole plan on them.

When you search for groups, Facebook shows "X members · Y posts per day" under each result. I used that number to pick targets. I assumed a high posts/day meant an active group, and a low posts/day meant a quiet room where my post would stay visible longer.

Both assumptions were wrong, because the number itself was wrong.

Here is what I found after opening each group and reading the real Activity panel inside it (About → Activity, which shows posts today and posts in the last month):

AliExpress Coupons & Promo Codes — 81,800 members. Search said 5 posts/day. Reality: 13 posts in the entire previous month, 0 that day.

AliExpress Community — 61,200 members. Reality: 57 posts last month, and the whole feed was a single post with 2 reactions.

Banggood / AliExpress Coupon Codes — 17,300 members. Reality: zero posts in the last month. Its rules also explicitly ban linking to any deals website, which I would have discovered after joining.

Three groups, roughly 160,000 combined "members", almost no human activity between them.

One group WAS genuinely alive: 155,000 members, 115 posts that day, threads with 83 real comments from real named people. But it was alive for a reason I hadn't considered. The admin farms engagement with posts like "Who here has stayed married to the same partner for more than 25 years?" The comments were lovely — people describing 50 and 61 year marriages — and completely unrelated to shopping. Real humans, wrong context.

And the one AliExpress group with real daily volume (70 posts that day, growing 259 members a week) described itself in its own About section as a place to "buy services like paid unpaid accounts". An account-fraud market. Not somewhere I want my product's name to appear.

The 30-second check I should have run first

Open the group, go to About, scroll to Activity. It gives you posts today and posts last month. Then scroll the actual feed and ask two questions:

1. Is any post written by someone who is not the admin?
2. Do the comments come from more than two or three recurring accounts?

In the 5,000 member group I joined, 100% of the posts were the admin's, cycling through the same four prompts. The only two humans who ever commented both wrote the same thing every time: "scammers", "avoid", "they ripped me off".

That check takes half a minute per group. I spent three weeks instead.

Context on what I was promoting

I record the daily price of 70,387 AliExpress listings so you can tell whether a discount is real. So far I have checked 16,128 seller discount claims and 14,054 of them did not hold up. That crossed-out "original price" next to the discount badge is a number the seller types in themselves, and in most cases the item never sold at it.

I am 30 days into recording. My main competitor has been doing it since 2016 and another claims over 2 million monthly users. I am not going to win on data depth for a long time, which is exactly why distribution matters so much for me right now, and exactly why losing three weeks stung.

The question I actually came here to ask

For a tool whose value only appears at the moment somebody is about to buy something, where did your first real users come from? Not "post on X" or "do SEO". I mean the specific place where people were already asking out loud the question your product answers. I would rather learn that from someone who has done it than burn another three weeks guessing.