Facebook and Instagram already have a decent amount of common ground, as you’d expect them to with the former owning the latter. In fact, one could even go as far as to say that Zuckerberg might be trying to blend them, along with WhatsApp, into one big social media clump.
Facebook and Instagram are about to get even more connected than they already are, with the social media conglomerate now testing a feature to let users cross-post their Facebook Feed photos and videos to Instagram.
Facebook and Instagram sitting in a tree…
Aside from the aforementioned Cronenberg-ing of Facebook and its relation, this would be a pretty neat feature for people who are active on both Instagram and Facebook with their visual work. Saves them the legwork of hopping between platforms and going through the posting process twice. Web cartoonists rejoice.
Other than that, it’s probably pretty useful for keeping your two platforms in sync with each other content-wise, if that’s something you worry about. According to Tech Crunch, the feature hasn’t had a full release yet. Instead, it’s being tested with a handful of users globally who already have their accounts linked up.
Once the feature becomes available to all, you’ll see a new box pop up when creating a post on Facebook, alongside the tag for deciding the audience for your post and the toggle for creating a new album. This toggle has the Instagram symbol in it next to an on/off switch. Tapping it will take you to a prompt that lets you opt-in to cross-posting.
This only applies to individual posts, so you can’t just leave it on after using it once. You can, however, select it as the default setting via your ‘Accounts Center’.
On the surface this doesn’t appear like much more than a useful (if a little gimmicky) tool for Facebook users to take advantage of, should they desire. But if you’re a little more critical of the social media titan (and we are), the ongoing linking of its properties points to something a little more sinister. Like making it harder to exit its ecosystem, for example.
There’s no word on when we can expect to see this feature roll out for all users.