How to Disconnect Facebook from Instagram

Thinking about untangling your Facebook and Instagram accounts? You're in the right place. Maybe you want to separate your personal life from your brand, fine-tune your audience strategies, or simply regain a bit more control over your digital footprint. This guide walks you through the exact steps to disconnect your accounts, explains what actually happens when you do, and offers a few tips on what to do next.

Why Disconnect Facebook from Instagram in the First Place?

Connecting your Facebook and Instagram accounts initially feels like a no-brainer. Meta makes it incredibly easy and highlights benefits like seamless cross-posting and unified login. But over time, you might find that what was once a convenience has become a constraint. There are several really good reasons why you might be looking to create some separation.

1. To Create a Distinct Brand Identity

If you're running a business or building a personal brand, your audience on Instagram is likely different from your audience on Facebook. Instagram thrives on visual storytelling, aesthetics, and in-the-moment creativity with Reels and Stories. Facebook often caters to a different demographic and content style, favoring community-building, longer text posts, and links to external articles.

When you automatically cross-post everything, you run the risk of delivering the wrong message to the wrong audience. A witty, emoji-filled caption that crushes it on Instagram might fall completely flat with your professional connections on your Facebook Page. Disconnecting allows you to tailor your content, captions, and hashtags specifically for each platform, building two stronger, more authentic brand presences instead of one watered-down version.

2. For Enhanced Privacy

Privacy is a growing concern for many people online. When your accounts are linked, you're giving Meta a more comprehensive picture of your activity across platforms. Your "likes" on Instagram can influence the ads you see on Facebook, and your connections can be suggested across services. For some, this feels a bit too intrusive. Unlinking the accounts creates a small but meaningful boundary, reducing the amount of data that's directly shared between the two profiles for personalization and ad-targeting purposes.

3. To Simplify Your Login and Security

Using Facebook to log into Instagram is convenient... until your Facebook account gets hacked, locked, or disabled. When one domino falls, they all fall. If you lose access to your primary Facebook account, you could be scrambling to regain access to your Instagram profile as well. By disconnecting them, you can create a separate, strong password for your Instagram account. This gives each account its own secure point of entry and walls them off from one another, so a security issue on one platform doesn't automatically compromise the other.

4. To Stop Accidental Cross-Posting

It's happened to the best of us: you post a casual Story to your personal Instagram, and before you know it, you've accidentally shared it with your professional network on your Facebook Page. Or you share a funny Reel, only to realize the "Share to Facebook" toggle was on, and it doesn't align with your Facebook content strategy. These little accidents can be annoying at best and professionally embarrassing at worst. Disconnecting your accounts completely removes the possibility of these slip-ups, giving you total and intentional control over what gets posted and where.

5. To Troubleshoot Technical Issues

Sometimes, the connection itself is the problem. Glitches can cause posts to fail when cross-posting, messages to not sync correctly between inboxes, or ads to not run properly. It can be surprisingly difficult to diagnose the source of these errors when everything is tangled together. Unlinking the accounts is often a "turn it off and on again" solution recommended by support teams. It allows you to reset the connection and can often clear up stubborn bugs that have no other obvious cause.

What Actually Happens When You Unlink Your Accounts?

The idea of disconnecting things can feel a little scary. Will I lose my photos? Will my followers disappear? The short answer is: no. Your content and connections are safe. However, unlinking your profiles does change how they interact with each other. Here’s a clear breakdown of what to expect.

What Will Stop Happening:

• No More Automatic Cross-Posting: This is the biggest change. You will no longer have the option to automatically share your Instagram feed posts, Stories, or Reels to your Facebook profile or Page. You'll need to post content to each platform manually.
• Unified Inbox Will Separate: If you're used to managing your Instagram Direct Messages from your Facebook Page's Meta Business Suite inbox, that functionality will stop. Your Instagram DMs will only be accessible through the Instagram app.
• Single Sign-On is Disabled: If you use your Facebook credentials to log in to Instagram, this will be disabled. You’ll need to create a dedicated password for your Instagram account to log in going forward.

What Might Be Affected:

• Instagram Shopping: If you use Instagram Shopping and it's linked to a product catalog on a Facebook Page, disconnecting the accounts can disrupt this feature. You may need to review your Commerce Manager settings to ensure everything continues to work correctly.
• Facebook Ads Manager: When you run ads for your Instagram account through Facebook Ads Manager, Meta uses the connection to seamlessly place ads. After disconnecting, you might need to re-authenticate or adjust audience settings a bit, but you can still run ads on Instagram through the Ads Manager, the connection just isn't automated in the background.

What Is NOT Affected:

• Your Content and Profile: Absolutely nothing will be deleted. All of your existing photos, videos, Reels, Stories highlights, and captions will remain exactly where they are on both platforms.
• Your Followers and Friends: Your follower list on Instagram and your friends or Page on Facebook will not change in any way.
• Previously Cross-Posted Content: Any posts you previously shared from Instagram to Facebook will remain on Facebook. Disconnecting the accounts doesn't retroactively delete anything.

Essentially, unlinking returns Facebook and Instagram to being two separate apps, just as they were before you connected them. You lose some integrated features, but you gain full control.

Step-by-Step Guide: How to Disconnect Facebook from Instagram

Ready to make the switch? The process happens within the Instagram app through Meta's "Accounts Center," which is the central hub for managing all your connected profiles. The steps are the same for both iPhone and Android users.

Follow these instructions carefully:

1. Go to Your Instagram Profile

Open the Instagram app and tap on your profile picture in the bottom-right corner to go to your main profile page.

2. Open "Settings and Privacy"

Tap the hamburger menu icon (the three horizontal lines) in the top-right corner. A menu will pop up. Select the first option, which should be "Settings and privacy."

3. Navigate to Accounts Center

At the very top of the "Settings and privacy" screen, you'll see a section called "Accounts Center." Tap anywhere on this section to open it. It's often highlighted in blue and reads, "Manage your connected experiences and account settings across Meta technologies."

4. Find Your Accounts List

Inside the Accounts Center, scroll down to the "Account settings" section. Tap on the option labeled "Accounts." This will show you a list of all the Instagram and Facebook profiles currently linked together.

5. Select the Account to Remove

You’ll see your Instagram account(s) and your linked Facebook profile listed. Find the Facebook account you want to disconnect, and tap the "Remove" button next to it.

6. Confirm the Account Removal

A few confirmation screens will appear explaining exactly what will happen when you remove the account. This is Instagram’s way of making sure you understand the changes we discussed earlier.

• The first screen will give you an overview. It will say something like "Remove [Your Facebook Name] from this Accounts Center?" Tap "Remove account."
• A final confirmation pop-up will appear. It double-checks that you want to proceed and reminds you that this will remove you from any connected experiences. Tap "Continue."
• Another message may ask if you are sure... one last time. Tap "Yes, remove [Your Facebook Name]."

And that’s it! Your accounts are now unlinked. A little green notification at the top will likely confirm that the account has been removed successfully.

What to Do Immediately After Disconnecting

Once you’ve successfully separated your accounts, there are two quick things you should do to ensure a smooth transition.

1. Check Your Instagram Password

If you've been using the "Log in with Facebook" button for years, you might not have a dedicated Instagram password. Go to your Instagram login settings and set one up now. This is a critical step to ensure you can always access your account. To do this, simply log out of Instagram. When you get to the login screen, tap "Forgot password?" and follow the prompts to create a new one using your email address or phone number.

2. Review Your Social Media Workflow

With cross-posting disabled, you now need a system for posting on both platforms. This is a great opportunity to be strategic. Decide what content is best for each audience. Maybe your Reels go on both, but your casual Stories only stay on Instagram, and your professional news gets posted directly to Facebook. Planning your content intentionally for each platform is a hallmark of a great social media strategy.

Final Thoughts

Unlinking your Facebook and Instagram accounts is a straightforward process that gives you more control and flexibility over your branding, privacy, and content strategy. Following the steps in the Accounts Center takes just a couple of minutes and empowers you to manage each platform as a unique entity, tailored to the audience you've built there.

After separating your accounts, you might find that managing two distinct content calendars becomes a bit of a juggle. That’s where a good organizational tool can make all the difference. We built Postbase to solve this exact problem: to help creators and marketers manage multiple platforms without the chaos. With our visual calendar, you can plan and schedule content for both your newly independent Instagram and Facebook accounts from one clean dashboard, making it easy to see your whole strategy at a glance.