Two clauses worth flagging in a 12 month social media agreement

I don't know contracts but the account thing seems obviously wrong even to me? You wouldn't let a property manager put the utilities in their own name and hand them over when the relationship ends. Make the accounts yourself, add them as a manager, done.

Wren has it. In trades this is the same as a sub who won't hand over as-builts until final payment. Everybody does it, and everybody who does it has been stiffed before, so I don't read it as malice. Doesn't mean you accept it. You just say the accounts go in our name and we grant you access, and if they say no, that tells you something.

Curious what the samples look like, because $2,400 for 16 posts and 4 videos is $150 an item and that's the range where you're either getting a solo operator at capacity or a shop that's subcontracting the editing. Ask who actually cuts the video. I've been looking at this side of the business and the person who sells is very often not the person who edits, and the samples on the pitch deck are the best three months of somebody else's account.

Asking for redlines doesn't make a client difficult, it makes them a client who reads. A provider who folds at the first question is the bigger worry. Two things worth adding: what happens to the email list, and where does it live? If a campaign was built inside the provider's own email platform under their account, the list has the same problem as the social logins, and a list of co-investor contacts is worth more than the posts are.

A contract like this is close to the shape most small service teams write, so here's what's usually behind each clause. Account ownership under the client's email exists because clients lose credentials constantly and then blame the vendor when posting stops working. The boring fix is the client owns the accounts and grants admin access, and accepts that a fumbled two factor setup is their own outage. A provider who won't accept that arrangement is holding the audience as collateral, and it's worth saying so out loud. IP transferring only on full payment of the term is not something worth signing. Better wording is assignment on payment of the invoice covering that deliverable, so month two paid means month two content belongs to the client. That exact wording is worth asking for. The 90 day termination with remainder payable is where pushing back actually matters. That's not a notice period, that's the whole contract. A standard in this corner is 30 days notice with anything delivered paid for. Whether a remainder clause is enforceable in a given state is a question for an attorney, worth asking before signing rather than after.

The clause nobody flags in these agreements is approval turnaround. If the agreement does not say how long you have to approve content and what happens when you do not, you will be the bottleneck by month three, the shop will post unapproved or stop posting, and the argument that follows will be about which. Put 48 hours in and a default. Also cobalt is right about the remainder clause, that one is worth more than the IP timing in practice.

$28,800 to attract co-investors and off-market sellers. The real question is what one of either is worth. If a single co-investor relationship is worth six figures of committed capital over five years, this is cheap and the redlines being argued only matter in a breakup. If that number is not known yet, that is the number worth finding before the redlines.

A group that's never spent on marketing can't know that yet. That's the whole reason to keep the term short.

Twelve months at $2,400 with a remainder-payable exit is a $28,800 commitment dressed as a monthly. Price it as the commitment. Anyone who would hesitate to write one check for $28,800 against an unmeasured channel shouldn't sign a version that behaves like one check. A reasonable counter: three month initial term, monthly after, 30 days notice, deliverables assigned as paid, accounts held in the client's name. If the shop wants the 12 months, they can price it with a discount, say $2,000, and even then a performance review gate at month three where the client can walk is worth holding out for. Good samples are not evidence the samples will work for a different audience. Different audience, different offer, different result.

One thing I'd separate out. The listing descriptions and the case study content are doing two unrelated jobs. Property copy sells a specific asset to buyers. Case study posts build your credibility with people who might wire you money later. The second one has compliance edges depending on how you're raising, and how far you can go in public about a raise is a securities question for your counsel, not a question for your content shop. I'd want them to know that a draft can be well written and still be something you can't publish.

The IP clause took three careful passes before the problem jumped out. So if you paid eleven months and stopped, none of the eleven months of posts are legally yours, even the ones already published? That seems like it can't be what they meant.

Juniper, I think that's exactly what it says and I also think they didn't write it, they downloaded it. Which is the thing I'd have been embarrassed to say out loud: most of these agreements are a template somebody bought once. When you send redlines you often find out the provider has no attachment to the words at all and just says fine.

Fathom, ask the question the plain way. "We'll own the accounts and content as we pay for it, three month term to start. Does that work?" If the answer is yes you've spent one email. If the answer is a lecture about how they always do it this way, you've learned something for free.