The social media giant is testing a new “Accounts Center” feature that will give users more control to manage their connected experiences across Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger and also let people cross-post content on these platforms. “Switching apps to post the same content or entering your credit card information dozens of times is a pain. We want to make that easier while giving you better controls to manage your experience,” Oren Hod, Product Manager at Facebook wrote in a blog post. “Whether you want to share a story to Instagram and Facebook at the same time, or use your Facebook account to log into Instagram, setting up your Accounts Center will allow you to control connected experiences that work across our apps.”
Using Accounts Center and connected experiences is optional. In Accounts Center, you can easily turn any of these connected experiences off or on including Single Sign On, which lets you log in and recover your accounts more easily, and cross-posting, which lets you share the same story or post on both Instagram and Facebook. Facebook also points out that using Accounts Center doesn’t mean that users need to have the same identity across all of the apps. In other words, users can have different name and profile photos across Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. However, users can sync their name and profile photo across all of Facebook-owned apps. For instance, when a name or profile photo is changed on Facebook, it will update on Instagram as well. Also, if the user changes his mind, he can stop his name and profile photos from syncing going forward. Later this year, Facebook is also adding Facebook Pay information to Accounts Center. In the U.S., you can enter your payment information once on Facebook and then use Facebook Pay to make secure purchases and donations across Facebook and Instagram without entering your information multiple times. According to Facebook, using the Accounts Center won’t change the way Facebook uses your data, since it’s already using data across all of its apps for targeted advertising. Facebook will still use the information to “personalize experiences across accounts, like suggested friends and accounts to follow.” It will provide more “relevant” content including advertisements as before even with users uniting their accounts through the new tool. The Accounts Center feature will be available in settings on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger.
