Who owns the accounts an agency runs
You should own every account and every login, and the agency should work on access you grant and can withdraw. Any arrangement where the agency created the account in its own name, or holds the only password, is a risk that eventually costs somebody their entire audience.
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This is the boring question that decides whether a bad agency relationship costs you a month or costs you everything. People ask about price, deliverables and reporting, and almost nobody asks who technically owns the account until the relationship ends badly and the answer becomes urgent.
What can actually go wrong?
The failure is simple: an agency opens the account, runs it for two years, the relationship ends, and the brand discovers the audience it paid to build lives somewhere it cannot reach.
Sometimes this is deliberate leverage. Far more often it is accidental, because somebody on the agency side created the page with a work email during onboarding and nobody thought about it again. The outcome is identical either way. Platforms are extremely reluctant to arbitrate ownership disputes, and a support ticket saying the other party will not hand over an account rarely ends the way a brand expects.
| The asset | Who should hold it | Why |
|---|---|---|
| The account itself | The brand, always | It is the audience you paid for |
| Admin access | The brand | Access granted can be withdrawn |
| Operator access | The agency, granted by you | Enough to work, never to lock you out |
| Source files | The brand, in your storage | Content you paid for is yours |
What does a safe arrangement look like?
The brand creates or already owns the account and grants the agency a working role through the platform’s own business tools rather than handing over a password.
That single habit removes almost every version of this problem. Access granted through a business manager or equivalent can be revoked in a minute, survives staff changes on both sides, and leaves a record of who did what. Sharing the actual password does none of that, and on several platforms it also breaks the terms you both agreed to.
The second habit is storage. Finished assets and source files should land in a folder you own, continuously, not at the end of a contract. An agency that cannot produce your own files at an hour’s notice is holding them, whether or not it means to.
What should the contract say?
Three things: that you own the accounts and content, that access is granted and revocable, and that handover on exit is a defined step rather than a goodwill gesture.
Watch for the reverse of each. A clause assigning content ownership to the agency until final payment sounds reasonable and turns into leverage. A clause where the agency retains the account for the duration and assigns it afterwards is worse. And an agreement silent on handover is the most common of all, because nothing was intended and nothing was written.
We never operate an account we have not been given access to, and we never create an account in our own name for a client. The accounts are yours on day one and they stay yours, which is the same principle behind one operator instead of five freelancers: the output belongs to the business rather than to whoever happens to be producing it.
Does this change for white label work?
Not for the client. An agency reselling our work still holds the client relationship and the client still owns their accounts, which is set out on white label social media for agencies.
The same applies to approval. If you want every post signed off before it publishes, that is a setting rather than an upgrade, described on approval before anything publishes. Ownership and control are different questions, and a brand can hold both without doing any of the work.
If you are currently in the bad version of this, the fix is usually recoverable: create the business structure you should have had, invite the existing account into it, and move on. It is an afternoon of administration that prevents a very bad quarter.
The rest of the questions people ask before hiring are on the answers hub, what the work itself covers is what a social media management company does, and the managed service is social media management. If you want the access and handover terms in writing before anything else, ask on the contact page.