Social Media Campaign Checklist

Workflow a social media manager runs to plan, produce, launch, and measure a paid-and-organic social campaign across LinkedIn, Meta, TikTok, and X. Covers brief, creative production, FTC and brand-safety review, UTM and pixel QA, launch, in-flight optimization, and post-mortem...

5 sections 26 steps Collects data
1

Campaign Planning

  1. Draft the campaign brief

    • The marketing manager writes the brief: business objective, primary KPI (CPA, ROAS, CPL, or engagement rate), target ICP/persona, offer, hero message, and in-market dates. Anchor the KPI to one number — campaigns optimizing for three things optimize for none.

  2. Capture the primary campaign objective
    Collects list
  3. Confirm channel mix and budget split

    • Map budget across LinkedIn Campaign Manager, Meta Ads Manager, TikTok Ads, and X Ads based on where the ICP actually spends time. B2B SaaS leans LinkedIn + retargeting; DTC leans Meta + TikTok. Reserve 10-20% for in-flight reallocation to the winning channel.

  4. Define audience segments and exclusions

    • Build per-channel audiences: LinkedIn job titles + company size, Meta lookalikes off CRM seed lists, retargeting windows. Always exclude existing customers from acquisition campaigns and current opportunities from awareness — burning paid impressions on closed-won accounts is the most common waste.

  5. Note influencer or partner involvement
    Collects list
2

Creative Production

  1. Build creative concepts against the brief

    • Creative director and copywriter present 2-3 concepts mapped to the brief's hero message. Each concept needs a still, motion, and copy variant so we have testable creative on Day 1, not just one hero asset.

  2. Produce per-channel asset specs

    • Each platform has different aspect ratios and safe areas: 1:1 and 4:5 for Meta feed, 9:16 for Reels and TikTok and Stories, 1.91:1 for LinkedIn single-image. Caption-safe zones differ. Repurposing a 16:9 hero into 9:16 by squashing is the most common Figma-export sin.

  3. Write platform-specific copy variants

    • Don't ship the same caption to LinkedIn and TikTok. LinkedIn tolerates long-form thought leadership; TikTok needs a hook in the first 3 seconds; X is character-constrained. Each variant has its own CTA and link tracker.

  4. Stage assets in the DAM

    • Upload finals to Bynder/Brandfolder/Frontify with campaign tag, channel, aspect ratio, and version. Locked, dated naming convention. Designers pulling "v3_FINAL_actually_final" off Slack threads is how the wrong cut goes live.

  5. Run brand and legal review
    Collects list Collects paragraph Collects file
3

Pre-Launch QA

  1. Configure UTMs against the convention doc

    • Use the shared link-builder. Source = platform (linkedin, meta, tiktok), medium = paid_social, campaign = campaign slug from brief, content = creative variant. UTM convention drift across campaigns is what makes GA4 reports uncomparable quarter-to-quarter.

  2. Verify pixels and conversion events fire

    • Walk the funnel with Meta Pixel Helper, LinkedIn Insight Tag Helper, and GA4 DebugView. Confirm purchase/lead events fire on actual submit — not on email-blur. The GA4 conversion mis-mapped 5x reality story is real and recurring.

  3. Confirm consent gating before pixels load

    • If the campaign targets EU traffic, verify the CMP (OneTrust, Cookiebot, Didomi) blocks marketing pixels until consent is granted. Tag-management gating via consent state is the correct pattern. Banner-says-no, pixel-fires-anyway is a GDPR finding.

  4. Confirm FTC disclosure on creator content

    • Required only when the campaign uses paid creator/influencer content. #ad at the top of the caption (not buried in 30 hashtags) plus the platform's "Paid partnership with [brand]" feature toggled on. Spot-check each creator's draft post before scheduled go-live.

  5. Run landing page and form QA

    • Submit a real test lead and verify it lands in the CRM (Salesforce/HubSpot) with correct source-medium-campaign, routes to the right owner, and triggers the nurture in the MAP. Lead-routing failures discovered Day 3 of a $50K campaign are entirely preventable here.

4

Launch & In-Flight

  1. Schedule organic posts via Sprout or Hootsuite
  2. Activate paid campaigns at low daily caps

    • Launch each ad set at 25-50% of the planned daily budget for the first 48 hours so the algorithm can stabilize without burning spend on a misconfigured audience. Ramp to full pacing only after pixel data confirms events firing correctly.

  3. Staff community management for response SLA

    • Social media manager owns inbound DMs, comments, and tags during launch window with a 2-hour business-hours response SLA. Escalation path for negative sentiment or PR-grade mentions defined before launch, not improvised at hour two.

  4. Hold the 72-hour optimization checkpoint
    Collects list
  5. Reallocate spend to winning ad sets

    • Triggered only when the 72-hour checkpoint flags underperformance. Pause the bottom-quartile ad sets, shift budget to the top performers, and rotate fresh creative variants from the DAM into the underperforming placements. Document the change and the hypothesis.

  6. Monitor brand-safety and frequency caps

    • Pull the placement report from each platform and the brand-safety partner (DoubleVerify, IAS) if applicable. Frequency above ~7 on awareness campaigns is wasted spend; cap and rotate. Add any flagged adjacencies to the blocklist.

5

Post-Campaign Reporting

  1. Pause campaigns and confirm spend stopped

    • Belt-and-suspenders end-of-flight: pause the campaign, set the daily budget to floor, and verify zero spend the next morning. Programmatic placements have served past pause windows before — confirm the actual ledger, not the UI status.

  2. Pull final metrics into the reporting dashboard

    • Reconcile platform-reported numbers (Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok, X) with GA4 and the CRM. Platform-attributed conversions almost always exceed GA4-attributed; report both with the methodology footnote so the CMO isn't surprised.

  3. Compare results to KPI targets in the brief
  4. Run the post-mortem with the campaign team

    • Marketing manager, creative lead, media buyer, and ops review what worked, what didn't, and what to repeat. Capture three things to repeat, three to change, and one to retire. File in the campaign-archive Notion or Confluence page.

  5. Deliver the campaign report to stakeholders
    Collects file

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Steps 26
Category Marketing
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