This week some social media users reported seeing the following notification in their Facebook feed:

We can see that it is not only Facebook’s messaging tools that are slowly becoming more intertwined.

The above notifications explain that some users are now capable of viewing Instagram Stories on Facebook with the Instagram Story appearing within the Facebook Stories feed, though with an Instagram rainbow border around the profile circle, as opposed to a Facebook blue one.

The screenshot, posted by Twitter user @ec_wife (and shared by social media expert Matt Navarra, has since been confirmed by the social media platform Facebook, which has said that this is a limited test for now, not also that but it will be analyzing feedback on initial responses to the option.

Instagram Stories on Facebook

However, as per the description in the screenshots, if you want to view an Instagram Stories on Facebook, you need to be connected with that user on both Facebook and Instagram, and that user has to have linked their Facebook and Instagram accounts.

It is clear that most people likely to have connected their presence on both social media platforms, but bear in mind that this also means that the process is beholden to your privacy settings on both social media platforms. Moreover, if you have restricted who can access your Instagram Stories, your Facebook connections also won’t be able to see it, unless they are in your “Close Friends” group, or so.

That means the only people who will be able to view your Instagram Stories on Facebook are the ones that you are connected to on both social media platforms, but also brands that have a presence on both, which you follow on Instagram and Facebook, will also be eligible to have their Stories displayed via this linkage.

As noted, this is an expansion of Facebook’s effort to integrate its back-end processes, which some have suggested is a means in order to help it avoid being broken up if the ongoing antitrust investigation into Facebook were to progress to that stage.

Remember, that this boosts Stories exposure and could help Facebook increase engagement but also if Facebook could argue that its networks are all connected and that functionality on each app is tied to the other, that could make it harder to make the apps separated if it were asked to do so.

Note that it is a small scale test for now, and we will keep you posted about “Instagram Stories on Facebook” updates