Social Media Engagement Checklist

Pull the editorial calendar in Notion or Airtable and confirm the week's content pillars map to the quarterly campaign themes. Flag any slots without an assigned creator or approver before drafting begins.

LinkedIn copy is not Instagram copy. Brief separately: hook in first 2 lines for LinkedIn, vertical 9:16 for Reels and TikTok, square 1:1 for feed, 1200×630 for link previews. Note CTA, target persona, and source links per post.

Use the shared link-builder so source/medium/campaign match the team UTM convention doc. Common drift: linkedin vs LinkedIn vs li creates uncomparable GA4 reports.

Source images and video from Bynder or Brandfolder — never lifted from a Slack thread or Google Image search. Confirm license, alt text, and brand-guideline compliance (logo lockup, color palette, typography) before scheduling.

Any post involving paid creators, gifted product, affiliate links, or employee endorsements needs a clear material-connection disclosure per FTC Endorsement Guides — #ad at the top of the caption, not buried in 30 hashtags. Use platform-native disclosure (Paid Partnership label) where available.

Use the approval workflow in Sprout or Hootsuite — not Slack DMs. A timestamped record of brand-manager and legal approval is what compliance auditors actually look for. Capture written claims with substantiation per Lanham Act expectations.

Confirm #ad or #sponsored appears at the start of the caption and the platform Paid Partnership tag is enabled where supported. For affiliate links in bio or stories, check that the disclosure is visible without expanding the caption.

Address the reviewer notes verbatim, log the change in the approval thread, and route back to the original approver. Do not schedule until the approval status flips to Approved.

Schedule against the audience-active windows from last quarter's analytics (not generic best-time-to-post charts). Stagger same-day cross-posts by at least 30 minutes so feeds don't show identical creative back-to-back.

Check the link-preview unfurl, image crop, alt-text presence, and emoji rendering on LinkedIn, Instagram, X, and TikTok individually. Carousel covers and Reel thumbnails are the most common to break after scheduling.

For any landing page linked from a post, verify Meta Pixel and LinkedIn Insight Tag fire only after OneTrust or Cookiebot consent is granted. Pre-consent firing is the single most common GDPR audit finding.

Morning and afternoon sweeps in the unified inbox: respond to direct messages, tagged mentions, and comments on posts under 72 hours old. Route product complaints to support, sales inquiries to the SDR queue.

Use Sprout Listening or Brandwatch to capture mentions, sentiment, and share of voice. Flag any negative sentiment cluster immediately to the comms lead — a single viral complaint can become a 24-hour issue.

Review listening alerts and DM volume spikes. A brand-safety incident is a sentiment shift, a viral complaint, or unexpected adjacency that needs escalation before scheduled posts run.

Pause the queue in Sprout, notify the comms lead and brand director, and hold all scheduled sends until the holding statement is approved. Resuming a tone-deaf scheduled post during an incident is the recurring nightmare scenario.

Reshare with creator permission and proper attribution; never repost UGC without explicit DM consent (Meta and TikTok ToS both require it). Tag the creator in caption and frame, not just alt text.

Reach, impressions, engagement rate, and follower delta from native analytics; sessions, conversions, and assisted conversions from GA4 filtered by social source-medium. Note any UTM gaps that broke attribution.

Mark each KPI green/yellow/red against the quarterly OKR targets. Two consecutive red weeks on the same metric triggers a strategy retro with the demand-gen lead.

Post the recap in the #marketing channel and email the demand-gen lead, brand director, and PMM. Include top-performing post, biggest miss, and the one experiment to run next week.