Facebook and Instagram are both among the most important, influential and popular social media sites. What’s more, they are both owned by the same company – Meta. That’s why connecting them and sharing data between them is so easy and encouraged by the company. What if you don’t want to do that though?
What are Connected Experiences on Facebook and Instagram?
The process of connecting Instagram and Facebook creates what both platforms call a Connected Experiences space. That’s the name for a feature, where most of your data is shared between both of these platforms, which helps them tailor algorithms to your liking on both sites. This means better friends and page recommendations, as well as Reels and Shorts that feel more tailored to your liking. On Meta’s side, this also means better, more personalized ads.
From 2020 these Connected Experiences are even better in some regions, as Meta rolled out Instagram DM and Facebook Messenger integration. These two text communicators became interchangeable and linked, so you can receive and send texts cross-platform on those sites.
This link – however beneficial to some – might not be that helpful if you intend to separate your experiences on both platforms or want to see completely different types of content on Instagram and Facebook. Fortunately, linking both of these sites is not permanent and you can easily opt out of this integration. Here’s how to do it:
Go into your Setting and privacy tab
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First, you’ll need to go to the Settings and privacy tab in the Instagram app. To do so, you need to visit your profile page (the person icon in the bottom-right corner). then, in the top right corner, tap the options menu – it’s the three horizontal bars. Next, in the pop-up screen, select Settings and privacy option (just Settings on iOS).
Visit Accounts Center
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The next stop is the Accounts Center. To get there, simply tap on the Accounts Center option tab, which should be at the very top of the list. You can also use the search function to locate it, if it does not appear at the top for some reason. You might also see a pop-up telling you these settings are now in Accounts Center, and the link might be towards the bottom of the screen under the Meta logo, especially on iOS.
Navigate to the Accounts menu
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In the Accounts Center, you’ll notice that the layout and colour of the page have changed – that’s good. Once there, tap on the Accounts tab and continue there.
Choose the account that you want to unlink and tap on Remove
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Once in the Accounts menu, you can now choose the Facebook account that you want to unlink from your Instagram page. Simply tap on the Remove button next to the profile that you’ve chosen to unlink.
Read through the warnings and continue with the process
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Once you click remove, you will be greeted by three pages in a row that explain the consequences of removing a Facebook profile from your Instagram page. Once you’ve read through them, simply tap on Continue in order to unlink the accounts.
Can I disconnect Facebook Messenger from Instagram?
It’s also important to note that from 2020, Facebook and Instagram allow you to cross-chat between these platforms if your accounts on both platforms are linked. The process above also removes this functionality, which means that you’ll no longer receive messages from Facebook on Instagram, and the other way around.
That information is crucial for people who have quite a DM mess because of this connection between Instagram and Facebook. Unlinking these two social media platforms might be a great way to handle your private messages and get your socials sorted once again.
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Author: Adrian Sobolewski Kiwerski, Mobile Contributor
Adrian's interests lie mainly in portable electronics - smartphones, wearables, wireless headphones and everything in between. Covering both the everyday news and bigger-picture stories, he tries to stay on top of the ever-growing industry.