What to Do Before You Give an Agency Your Instagram

A lot of the restaurant accounts we take over are still logged in on a phone that belongs to a cousin who stopped working there two years ago. Nobody knows the password. The email on file is one somebody made in high school. The Facebook page is attached to a personal profile that got deactivated. That is the real starting point for most local businesses, and it is why the question of how to give agency access to Instagram matters more than it sounds. Done right, it takes ten minutes and you keep everything. Done wrong, you can lose the account you spent six years building.

Here is how to set it up so that whoever you hire can work, and you still own what is yours.

Your password is not an access method

The default move is to text the login to whoever is doing your posting. Do not do that.

Three things go wrong. First, Instagram sees a new device in a new city and locks the account, and now the recovery code is going to an email nobody can open. Second, you have no record of who did what. If a post goes up wrong or a message gets answered badly, there is one account and four people in it. Third, when you and that person part ways, your only option is to change the password and hope they did not change the recovery email first.

There is a built-in way to do this that does not involve a password. Use it.

The account should live in your business portfolio, not the agency's

Meta's business tools let you keep ownership and grant access separately. The structure you want looks like this:

• You have a business portfolio in Meta Business Suite. It is yours. It was created with your email.
• Your Facebook page and your Instagram professional account are both claimed inside it.
• Your ad account is also inside it, with your card attached.
• The agency gets added as a partner, or as a user with specific permissions. Not as owner.

The partner setup is the clean one. The agency gives you their business ID, you add them as a partner on the assets you want them touching, and you choose the level. They can create and publish posts, pull reports, reply to messages, run ads. They cannot remove you, cannot take the page, and cannot walk off with the ad account.

When the relationship ends, you remove the partner. One click. The account never changes hands because it never left your hands.

If an agency tells you they need to be the owner of the page or the ad account, or that they will "create a new account under our agency," ask why. There are situations where a business genuinely has nothing set up yet and someone has to build it. Fine. But it should be built in your name, with your email as the admin, and transferred to you before the first post goes up.

The ad account matters more than the Instagram account

People guard the Instagram handle and give away the ad account without thinking. It should be the other way around.

Your ad account carries history. Every dollar of spend, every audience, every piece of performance data, and your pixel or dataset if you have one connected to a site or an ordering system. That history is what makes the next campaign smarter than the last one. If the ad account belongs to the agency, you lose all of it on the way out, and the next person starts cold.

Two rules. The ad account sits in your portfolio. Your card is the one on file, so your ad spend goes to Meta directly and nobody marks it up on the way through. That is how we do it, and it is a fair thing to require from anybody you hire. Management fee is one line. Ad spend is a separate line that you can verify in your own billing page any time you want.

Who owns the footage is a separate question

Account access and content ownership are two different conversations, and the second one gets skipped.

When somebody shoots in your kitchen, ask plainly: what happens to that footage. Do you get the finished videos. Do you get the raw files. Can you use a clip in a print ad or on a delivery app listing or on a sign in the window, a year from now, without calling anyone.

Our answer is that it is your restaurant, your food, your staff, and your footage. We shoot it, we cut it, we post it, we keep it organized. You do not have to manage a folder of it, and that is part of the point of hiring us. But it is yours.

Get that in writing with whoever you hire, in one sentence. It does not need to be a legal document.

What to ask before you sign

Short list. Read it off your phone on the call.

• Will my page, Instagram account and ad account stay in my business portfolio?
• Will you be added as a partner, so I can remove access myself?
• Whose card pays Meta, and is ad spend marked up?
• Do I keep the footage you shoot, including the raw files?
• If we stop working together, what exactly do I have to do, and what do I lose?

An agency that does this every week will answer all five without hesitating. If the answers get vague, that is your answer.

What this looks like on our end

We ask for partner access on your page, your Instagram account and your ad account. If any of those three do not exist yet, or are stuck behind an old email, we fix that first and it ends up in your name. Then we shoot, write, schedule and post, and we track every post across platforms on our own dashboard so you can see what ran and what it did without logging into anything.

Your jobs are one call and a few references. That is it. If nobody at your place wants to be on camera, we can supply a model to front the brand.

Setting up access correctly is the first ten minutes of working together, not a negotiation. If you want to see how it would work for your business, book a call and we'll walk your accounts together, or call (313) 633-5714.