Ok y’all….
I’ve just wasted an hour and a half. Google searching. Youtube searching. Searching in Insta-FB groups. To no avail.
Finally, some tapping here and there and freakin everywhere and I THINK I’ve got it. Since all of the answers provided on this subject that I found were either terribly outdated (even from Instagram’s help center!) I thought I’d write a little posty post about it.
So, here goes.
I have a personal facebook page and also a few business pages. I wanted to link my @PhotographerHack Instagram account to my Photographer Hack Facebook business page. (I actually want to share posts to it easily, instead of having to manage both accounts – I’m on Instagram more than FB and I felt like some posts would have overlap.)
But every time I’d click the gear icon in the upper right corner of my account screen, scroll down to Settings and then tap on Linked Accounts, I’d tap Facebook, and it would say, “You are already Authorized” or something like that.
SO ANNOYING.
There was no option to unlink them. I played around on my FB business page forever.
Here’s what worked!
- First, under the gear icon’s “Options” (just above where I was tapping on Linked Accounts) I tapped Switch to a Business Profile. Which I really didn’t want to do….but you kinda HAVE to do this in order to link an instagram account to a Facebook business page. Makes sense, I guess.
- Then, I tapped the blue bar to Continue.
- Then it linked up my personal FB account – which again – I didn’t want, but THEN….It displayed for me a list of FB pages that I manage. YES. Thank you, Lord.
- I tapped on the FB Biz page I wanted, in this case, PhotographerHack. Then, tapped Next. Then, it wanted to set up my business profile.
- I only input my email address – I felt like my phone number and location were unnecessary for this. But if you’re a local business, like a photography business, for example, definitely at least put in your location.
Voila! Now, when I click on Linked Accounts, it does indeed show the correct business page linked to my business Instagram account. Not my personal FB account.
Yes, you’ll need to switch to the business account for this, and there’s much hullabaloo on if that’s a good idea or not. But since I am considering running Insta-ads in the future, might as well take the plunge. I’m hoping to get genuine engagement from my own engagement with my community.
Ok, wait. Hold the phone. AFTER I wrote this and then I tested it (whoopsie) even though everything SAID it was linked to my business Facebook account, it even listed the name of my facebook business account – the posts were STILL ending up on my personal timeline! Ugh.
Ok, more googling. I saw a thread where someone said that you needed to open up your Safari web browser on your phone and log out of Facebook. I did that. Just for good measure, I went ahead and deleted the FB app from my phone. Again, I switched from a business IG account to personal.
Then….I switched to a Business IG account. Linked the business FB page to it. Tried a post – and THANK THE LORD ALMIGHTY – it actually posted to my business FB account!!!!!!
So, the moral of the story, is that you have to logout completely of FB. There must be some cookie or something that keeps that link to the personal FB account. If you log out entirely, hopefully this will work for you.
Don’t worry, folks….I reinstalled the FB app and all is still working just fine…
