I started the #businesspics prompts on Instagram for several reasons, but a key one is to encourage both my clients and other Instagrammers to use the images they produce to support their business – Instagram pictures can be a fantastic way to give your followers a glimpse into the everyday life of your business, especially if you share them beyond Instagram to, for example, your Facebook page.
And then one of our participants said – wait – how do I do that? And so of course I realised that I’ve missed a step. Fortunately it’s not tricky but it can take a bit of hunting to find the connection so here’s the method:
The first step is to head to your profile (the bottom right button in Instagram, which always reminds me of a microwave oven) and tap the cog wheel at the top right.
If your version looks a bit different to mine, fingers crossed it functions in the same way! I’ve updated to iOS 7 which might explain the difference if you’re on an iPhone.
The next trick is to find the share settings – scroll down first through the Options page first (keep going!):
Then find and tap on “Share Settings” under Preferences.
You’ll get a few choices on the Share Settings screen but for now tap on Facebook (if you haven’t connected yet, it’ll be greyed out).
To configure it you’ll need to tap “Share to …” to take Instagram through to your Facebook login. You’ll need to log in (even if you want to use a business page, you will log in to your personal Facebook profile and later you get the chance to choose to share to a business page if you want).
I highly recommend NOT agreeing to “Share Likes to Timeline” – this means that every time you like an image on Instagram this action will appear on your Facebook feed – yep, that would be pretty annoying for your followers or friends!
Now that you’re set up, when you post an Instagram picture, you can tap on the Facebook icon on the page where you type in your caption and it’ll then share immediately to your Facebook profile or page (whichever you’ve set up).
One kind of annoying thing about Instagram is that there is no quick and easy way to change this – you have to go all the way through these menus if you want to change it and it’s not something that can be done mid-post. Sometimes I’d like to share some photos to my personal profile but it’s such an effort that I pretty much just leave it always set to post to my business page and only post some of my images (usually only one a day to my Facebook page – don’t want to overload people!).
So – does this make sense? Yell if my step-by-steps aren’t clear – it’s easy to overlook mentioning something that is clear to me but not to a normal person! And finally, if you want to join us for the rest of October’s #businesspics challenges, the prompts are below. It’s never too late to start and you don’t need to take part every day.
Jo at ZigaZag blog says
This was really useful advice, thank you. Especially the screenshots accompanying your explanations 🙂 I can't decide though whether to share to my personal timeline or my pages: Lifestyle Fifty or ZigaZag. Decisions, decisions 🙂 Here is the case for keeping all social media accounts as one, not several!
Amanda Kendle says
Ah yes, I have exactly that problem Jo! Well, in fact, at different times I want to share to each of them but it's so many steps to change it each time that in reality I virtually always just share to my business page and never get around to sharing the others. I'm hoping one day Instagram makes that a bit easier!
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