Social media management contract template with office hours.

A social media management contract has to say when the client must approve each month's posts, which hours the agency answers comments in, and what everything beyond that costs, because social media work has no natural point where it stops. The agreement below does that for a $3,450-a-month engagement with a two-gym climbing business, written out in full so you can copy it, download it as a Word file, or take it as a PDF.

A website is finished when it launches, and a brand project is finished when the guidelines are signed off. A social media account is never finished, which is the whole reason a client pays somebody to run it, and it means every month opens the same two questions again. Has anyone on the client's side looked at next month's posts, and is anybody watching the comments at nine on a Saturday night? A contract that leaves either one open hands the answer to whoever cares most in the moment, which is usually the client, and the agency pays for it in hours nobody invoices.

What does a social media management contract have to settle?

Five things: what goes out each month, when the client has to approve it, which hours somebody answers the accounts in, what anything extra costs, and who owns the accounts when the work ends. Most published versions cover the first and the last properly and leave the middle three as blanks, which matters because the middle three are where an agency's margin on this kind of work actually goes.

PandaDoc's template runs to ten sections, from the parties down to payment, with a twelve-item scope that includes engaging with followers, and it never says when that engagement happens or what the client has to do before a post goes live. Signaturely's version has thirteen clauses, lists advertising among the services without putting a budget or a limit beside it, and opens its list of services with "include but are not limited to", a phrase that reads as generous on the day it's signed and expensive in every month after. HeyOrca's nine-section guide for social media agencies comes closest, since it puts the approval process inside the scope, but it stops at saying there should be one and never gives it a date or says what happens when the date passes.

How do you write a month of social media down so it can be counted?

By turning every recurring task into a number per month, and then saying in the same section what isn't included. The agreement below does that for Copperline Climbing, a bouldering business with two gyms in Columbus, Ohio, that wants its Instagram and Facebook run by someone other than the front desk staff who have been posting between shifts.

Section 3 counts sixteen feed posts, six short videos of up to 45 seconds, twelve stories, one half-day shoot and one two-page report a month. Then 3.7 names what sits outside the month, which is paid ads, boosted posts, influencer outreach and any platform schedule A doesn't list, because a piece of work only counts once it has a number on it, and an exclusion is the number zero written down. Each of those counts comes back in section 6 with a price beside it, so a client asking for a seventeenth post is asking for something with a known cost rather than a favor.

What happens to a post the client never approves?

It doesn't go out, and under clause 4.3 it still counts as one of the month's sixteen. That's the clause the rest of this agreement leans on, because a social media calendar is built weeks ahead of the dates on it, and the one input an agency can't produce for itself is the client's sign-off.

Without 4.3, a late approval moves the cost onto the agency in a way nobody notices. The calendar arrives on the 20th, the approver is busy, and by the time they reply the first week's slots have passed, so the agency either crams those posts into the remaining weeks or quietly makes them up the following month. The work was done once and gets delivered twice, and the monthly fee hasn't moved. Clause 4.4 closes the other door too, since a held post only comes back if the approver books it as an extra at $160 under 6.1, which keeps one slow month from turning into a backlog the next month has to absorb.

This is where social media differs from the rest of a marketing retainer. A blog article or an ad creative that misses its approval can sensibly slide into next month, which is the rule a marketing scope of work uses for late approvals, but a post about Saturday's competition or this week's opening hours is worth nothing a month later, so a carry-forward rule just stores up posts nobody wants. The two-business-day window is short on purpose. It gives the agency enough time to schedule a post properly while making sure a client who approves on the 3rd only loses the posts dated before the 5th. If your clients work in a field where a compliance reviewer reads everything, lengthen the window and move the calendar's send date earlier by the same amount, so the month doesn't compress. Writing these dates down does the same job as listing the dates your client owes you on a project: an input that arrives late should move the client's plans, not the agency's margin.

Which hours does a social media manager actually answer comments in?

The ones the contract names, and a contract that names none has agreed to all of them. Clause 5.1 sets Monday to Friday, 9:00 to 17:30 Eastern, with a reply inside four business hours, and 5.2 says the plain thing most agreements leave unsaid, which is that nobody from the agency is watching the accounts outside those hours.

That sentence matters more for a climbing gym than it would for an accounting firm, because Copperline's members are busiest exactly when the agency is closed. Saturday afternoons, weekday evenings and school holidays are when people post about the gym, and some of what they post needs an answer. So 5.3 gives the client a way to get one, a phone number in schedule D that only the approver or the deputy can call, with the work charged at $195 an hour and a one-hour minimum under 6.7. The rate is high enough that nobody rings it about a typo and low enough that nobody hesitates when a member's video of a loose hold starts picking up shares.

Moderation sits in schedule E for the same reason. An agency deciding on its own to delete a member's complaint is making a call that belongs to the client, so the schedule lists what can be hidden without asking, which is usually spam, abuse and someone's personal details, and 5.4 sends everything else to the approver before anything disappears.

Who should own the accounts, and how does the agency get in?

The client owns every account, and the agency gets in through a role the client grants and can take away, never through a shared password. Clause 8.2 asks for partner access in Copperline's Meta business portfolio, which lets the gym see who has access to its Page and its Instagram account and remove an agency without changing a single login, and 8.3 has the agency remove its own access within two business days of the work ending.

That clause sounds like housekeeping, and it's the one clients remember. A business that has ever chased a former contractor for the login to its own Instagram will read 8.1 to 8.4 more carefully than anything about fees, and an agency that offers the handover terms up front is answering a worry the client hasn't said out loud yet. Ad spend is kept out of the agreement altogether in 7.4, because once a client starts running ads the fee question changes shape, and a spend band in the marketing proposal is the better place to settle it.

What does Copperline's March look like with every clause in play?

It bills $5,250 against a $3,450 fee, and every dollar of the difference was asked for by one of the two people schedule C names before the work was done.

The March calendar goes out on February 20, and the approver, Copperline's marketing lead, spends the last week of the month at a trade show. She approves it on March 4. The four posts dated March 1 to March 5 missed their two-day window, so under 4.3 they don't go out, they count as delivered, and the twelve that remain run as planned. In the second week Copperline books a bouldering competition for March 27 and asks for three extra short videos to promote it, which she approves in writing at $340 each under 6.2, or $1,020.

On Saturday March 13, a member's clip of a hold spinning off the wall starts circulating around eight in the evening, and the owner, who is the deputy in schedule C, calls the after-hours number. The agency spends three hours that night and one on Sunday morning replying, hiding two abusive comments under schedule E and drafting the gym's statement with the owner, which is four hours at $195, or $780. Near the end of the month the marketing lead asks to add TikTok as a third platform, and under 6.3 it starts on April 1 at $1,050 a month rather than being slipped into March.

Put together, March bills $3,450 plus $1,020 plus $780, which is $5,250. Written without sections 4 to 6, the same month most likely bills $3,450, with the four held posts squeezed into later weeks at a value of $640 at the 6.1 rate, the three videos done as a favor and the weekend handled because it felt wrong not to. That's $2,440 of work given away against a $3,450 fee, a little under 71% of the month, and TikTok would have joined the account in April the same way, as one more place to post rather than a $1,050 line on the invoice.

A post nobody approved still took somebody a day to make

If you copy one line of this agreement into the contract you already use, make it clause 4.3: "A post that is not approved two business days before its scheduled date is not published, and counts as delivered for that month." Most of the other clauses price something the client adds. This one deals with the thing a client most often forgets to do, which is look at the calendar on time, and it does that without charging anything, simply by refusing to let a late approval turn into free work.

The rest of the agreement follows from that one line. The hours in section 5 do for comments what 4.3 does for posts, the rate card in section 6 turns each request into a choice with a price on it, and if the monthly fee itself is the part you're unsure about, how a monthly retainer handles unused and extra hours covers that side of the deal. A solo social media manager can use the same agreement with one name in schedule C instead of two, and a freelance contract that prices the extra work shows the shorter version of the same idea for one person working alone.

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