Who owns your social accounts when you hire an agency?
Who owns your social accounts when you hire an agency, why most agency FAQs never say, and the terms plus offboarding sequence to settle before the first post.
Short answer
When you hire an agency the social accounts should stay yours, and with VALORAE Media they do. Accounts sit in your name with your recovery details, we work through delegated roles you can revoke in one click, and every file we make is yours on delivery. Most agencies never put this in writing. Ask before the first post.
Nobody asks this before signing. It comes up the week they want to leave, and by then the answer is already fixed: you own the accounts if they were set up so that you do, and no invoice or contract repairs it afterwards if they were not.
Ownership on a social platform is practical before it is legal. Whoever holds the primary login, the recovery email and the recovery phone is the owner as far as the platform is concerned. If an agency created your Instagram under its own email, or moved your Facebook page into a Business Manager it controls, you are a guest on your own page whatever the paperwork says.
Here is how to set it up, and the sequence to ask for when it ends.
Who owns your social accounts when you hire an agency?
Three separate things get bundled into the word "ownership", and they come apart the moment you part ways.
The accounts. The handle, the follower count, the post history, the DMs. Owned by whoever controls the login and the recovery details.
The content. The edits, captions, thumbnails and covers made during the engagement. Owned by whoever the agreement says, and if the agreement says nothing, you are in for an argument.
The infrastructure around them. The scheduler, the Business Manager, the ad account, the shared drive, the link-in-bio tool. Owned by whoever pays for the seat, which is often the agency.
You can win the first, lose the third, and still be unable to post on Monday. All of them need settling.
What the agency FAQ pages leave out
We read through the FAQ pages of a set of competing social media management agencies. One of them answers the question about passwords and two-factor authentication, and its answer is that it needs your credentials. None of them says who owns the accounts, or what happens to access when the engagement ends.
That silence is the tell. It is an easy question to answer. An agency that has thought about offboarding can describe it in a paragraph. An agency that has not will describe onboarding in detail and go quiet after that.
It is also where the bad stories come from. On r/smallbusiness there is a recurring thread where someone paid an agency, ended it after two months, and is asking strangers whether to demand a refund because they are not sure what they were left with. The mirror image from the other side: a manager who lost access to several client accounts at once because everything had been wired through one login. Both are the same failure. Access was built for convenience and never for the day it had to be handed back.
Four things to settle before the first post
The accounts stay in your name
Every account is created, or already exists, under an email address and phone number you control. Not the agency's, and not a shared inbox the agency created for you. If an account lives under someone else's details, moving it is the first task, before any content is made.
Check the recovery details specifically. The login email can be yours while the recovery phone still belongs to whoever set the account up years ago. Platforms send the reset code to the recovery contact, so that is the person who can lock you out.
Access is delegated, never shared
Every platform we would work on has a role system for exactly this. It works alongside two-factor authentication, which password sharing does not, and it can be revoked in one click without changing a single password.
| Platform | How delegated access works |
|---|---|
| Facebook and Instagram | Meta Business Suite roles on the page and the professional account |
| YouTube | Channel permissions, granted per Google account |
| Page admin roles, with content admin sitting below super admin | |
| TikTok | Business roles on the business account |
No platform on that list makes password sharing the only option. An agency that asks for it anyway has never had to hand an account back cleanly.
The role you grant should be the lowest one that does the job. Posting and reading analytics is a content or editor role on every platform above. Nobody needs to be a super admin to schedule a Reel.
Content is yours on delivery
The footage was always yours, because you filmed it. That is one of the quieter advantages of an agency that does not shoot: there is no argument about who owns the raw material.
The edits are the part to nail down. Our position is that every cut, caption, thumbnail and cover is yours the moment it is delivered, in full, with no licence terms and nothing extra to pay if you take it elsewhere. Get the same sentence from whoever you hire, in writing, before the first file comes back. Agencies that retain rights to their edits exist, and the day you find out is the day you try to repost something after leaving.
Nothing gets built inside agency-owned assets
This is the one most people miss. The accounts and the content can both be yours and you can still be stuck, because everything runs through tools the agency pays for.
The usual suspects:
- A scheduler seat under the agency's subscription
- A Meta Business Manager the agency owns, with your page assigned to it
- An ad account the agency created
- A shared drive on the agency's workspace
- A link-in-bio page on the agency's plan
- Brand templates in a design tool the agency licenses
When the engagement ends, each of those either transfers to you, gets rebuilt, or disappears. Ask which before they are set up. Where a tool has to sit under a paid account, the account should be yours and the agency gets a seat on it. It costs you the subscription and saves you the rebuild. When you are comparing two quotes, ask which tools are inside the price and whose name is on them, because a cheaper number sometimes means the agency owns more of your setup.
The offboarding sequence to ask for
Ask any agency to describe the last day. If they cannot, here is the sequence. Put it in the agreement.
- Written notice, with an agreed final posting date so the calendar does not stop mid-week.
- Every scheduled post either goes out as planned or is handed to you as a file with its caption, at your choice.
- All delivered content, plus anything in progress, exported to a drive you own, in the original formats and at full resolution.
- Any asset that lives under an agency account, such as a Business Manager, ad account, templates or link-in-bio page, is transferred to you or documented so you can rebuild it.
- A list of every access the agency holds, across every platform and tool.
- You revoke each one, from your side, and confirm the list is empty.
- Any agency-held login that could not be avoided is rotated by you on the same day.
Step six matters more than it looks. You revoke, rather than the agency. Revocation from your side is verifiable. "We have removed ourselves" is a claim.
How we set this up
We do not hold logins. On the Edit tier we need no account access at all, because you post. On Manage and Full Page you grant a delegated role on each platform and we work inside it, and you keep the top role and the recovery details throughout. Everything we make is yours on delivery. There is no contract to run out, so leaving is the sequence above and nothing more.
Treat this as a floor rather than a selling point, and check that anyone you hire clears it. If you are still deciding which parts of social media to hand over, posting access is the part to think hardest about, because it is the one thing that outlasts the engagement.
Ask about the last day before you agree to the first one. An agency that answers plainly will not mind being asked.
Frequently asked questions
Should I give an agency my password?
No. Every platform you would hire us for has a role system built for this. Meta Business Suite, YouTube channel permissions, LinkedIn page admin roles and TikTok business roles all let you grant posting rights without handing over the login, and all of them work alongside two-factor authentication. An agency that asks for the password either has not set this up or does not want to.
Who owns the content an agency makes for me?
Get it in writing, because the default is murky. Our position is that every edit, caption, thumbnail and cover is yours the moment it is delivered, with no licence terms and no extra fee to take it with you. The footage was always yours because you filmed it. Some agencies keep rights to their edits, which matters the day you leave.
What happens to my accounts if I stop working with the agency?
If access was delegated, nothing happens to the accounts. You remove the agency's role and carry on. If the agency holds the login or created the account under its own email, you are dependent on its goodwill to hand things back. That is the whole reason to insist on delegated access before the first post rather than after the last one.
Does VALORAE Media need admin access to my pages?
We need enough to post, schedule and read the numbers, which on most platforms is a content or editor role rather than full admin. You keep the top role and the recovery details. On the Edit tier we need no access at all, since you post. On Manage and Full Page we ask for the delegated role and nothing above it.
Want us to run the page, not just edit the videos?
We edit short form, long form and thumbnails, then title, caption, schedule and post them. Send one video and we will show you what we would do with it.
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