Linking your Facebook Business Page to your Instagram account is easy and comes with a lot of benefits.
Facebook owns Instagram, so they have made it easy for you, as a content creator, to share your posts and stories from one platform to another.
Let's look at how you can do that and why you should.
Benefits Of Linking
Increase Your Reach
If you are already posting on one of the platforms, why not share that post to the other? You've already done the content creation work so sharing your post to another audience will increase your reach.
Save Time
You can set it up that your posts automatically share across both Instagram and Facebook, which will save you time and effort.
Use Shoppable Tags
Linking your accounts is one of the necessary steps to using the shoppable tags on Instagram to sell your products.
Create Instagram Ads From Facebook
Rather than just boosting within the 'gram, you can create better ads within Facebook once the accounts are linked up.
Manage Instagram Comments & Messages From Facebook Page Inbox
If you find it hard to keep up with comments and replying to messages, you can tackle them all at once by linking the accounts up!
How To Link Your Accounts Up
On Facebook
Go to the publishing tools section of your Facebook business page.
Select 'Reconnect' or 'connect' (as below) and then confirm the access to the account you want to link up.
Then the next time you go to post you will see an option to include Instagram.
If you want to schedule the post across both platforms then you'll need to schedule it within your Creator Studio on Facebook (see below).
On Instagram
To link your Facebook account on Instagram it's pretty simple.
Go to settings - Account - Linked Accounts.
Then tap on Facebook and follow the steps through to link the accounts up!
To share your post from Instagram to Facebook, you can do it at the same time you are posting to Instagram by turning on the 'post to Facebook' button (below).
You can also share it to your Facebook page from Instagram after you have posted it on Instagram.
Just tap the three dots on the post and sharing it manually (below).
Some Rules To Cross Posting
Sharing between Instagram and Facebook is great (for all the reasons mentioned above). You can even turn on automatic sharing of your posts from Instagram to Facebook by going to your Instagram account and tapping - settings - account - linked accounts - Facebook and then turn on the 'share your posts to Facebook' option.
But just keep two things in mind:
1. Audience
You may have two slightly different audiences across the two platforms. If your Instagram content is more intimate than what you would share with your Facebook Business audience, then just keep that in mind, and edit the post accordingly. You might share a shorter version of the post on Facebook and/or change the first line, for example.
2. The Platform
Even though they are both owned by Facebook, the two platforms still have some differences. The most notable difference is that hashtags don't work the same way on Facebook as they do on Instagram. All this means is that when you go to share your Instagram post to Facebook, delete the hashtags.
It's up to you as a brand how you cross post. You can automate it or you can manually share it and then edit posts so that make sense for your individual audience on each platform.
The point is to link them up so that you have these options and can increase your reach and potential audience.
Cross Posting Stories
Stories are a big part of social media. More so in Instagram than Facebook at the moment.
By connecting the two platforms you can automatically share the stories you create in Instagram to Facebook to benefit your Facebook page.
To do this, go to your Instagram account and tap - settings - account - linked accounts - Facebook and then turn on the 'share your story to Facebook' option.
See below.
To Recap (screenshot this to reming yourself!
Tag me on Instagram Stories here)
Linking your Facebook & Instagram accounts is easy and allows you to cross post to benefit a larger audience.
Set it up on both sides (Facebook & Instagram).
Decide how you want to post, automatically share, or manually select and edit what you cross share.
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