Content Approval

Content Approval for social media is the process of post, image, video, or caption creation and review. Before a piece of content is actually 'shared' in a public space (like a platform of social media), it must go through an evaluation stage and be given the green light from the stakeholders involved. The stakeholders in this instance work across multiple departments—sometimes even across multiple agencies that work with a single brand.

These stakeholders review the content to make sure that what is about to be shared is on-brand, on-target, and won't infringe on any laws (or the brand that's doing the sharing will end up in 'hot water'). All this review (and in some cases, the heavy-handed editing that occurs as a result of the review) is good for keeping a brand's reputation intact. It's also necessary if you want to ensure that what you're sharing on social media is actually effective.

Content Approval can sometimes be done pretty quickly if the stakeholders already have a good sense of the piece of content that's being shared. But other times, it can be a drawn-out process with multiple rounds of revisions. In a worst-case scenario, Content Approval can eat up so much time in a marketing department's schedule that stakeholders and content creators are either sharing outdated information or being forced to share information that's effectively on the same timeline as a PR stunt (a good example of what's not to do is the way NASA handled the announcement of its Curiosity rover's findings regarding the surface of Mars).

Since good Content Approval leads to good content being shared, the only potential downside of this process (or this lack of Eubank's process) is that it can become a 'black hole' for time and resources.