Almost every avoidable public mistake would have been caught by two minutes of checking. A short social media quality assurance checklist exists to be run when attention is lowest — immediately before publishing.
Short enough to actually use
A twenty-item checklist gets skipped under deadline; eight items gets run every time. Include only checks that have caught something, and remove any that never has. The value is in the checklist being used, not in its completeness.
Run it as a separate step rather than while drafting. Checking your own work in the same pass that produced it is close to useless, because you read what you meant rather than what is there.
The checklist
- Facts: prices, dates, availability, names all verified.
- Claims: nothing promising a result the business cannot support.
- Links: every one opened and confirmed to reach the right place.
- Destination: correct account, correct platform.
- Media: right file, right crop, nothing important cut off.
- Alt text present and describing the image usefully.
- Captions or on-screen text legible without sound.
- Spelling of names, especially people and partners.
Names deserve their own line. Misspelling a partner or a customer is a small error with a disproportionate effect on how carefully everything else appears to have been done.
Grow it from real failures
Add an item each time something goes wrong, and only then. A checklist assembled from imagined risks is long and unused; one grown from actual incidents is short and respected, because everyone remembers why each line is there.
Scale the depth to reach. A routine post and a campaign that will be pinned for months do not need identical scrutiny, and pretending otherwise means the process is bypassed for both. Approval structure sits in the content approval process, and standards in the workflow documentation guide.
Common questions
Who should run the checks?
Ideally not the author. Fresh eyes catch what familiarity hides.
How long should it take?
Two or three minutes. Longer and it gets skipped when it matters most.
Should scheduled posts be re-checked?
Briefly, before they go out. Circumstances change between scheduling and publishing.
What about accessibility?
Alt text and legible captions belong on the list permanently. They are easy to add and easy to forget.
Should the checklist differ per platform?
Mostly it should not. Facts, claims and links matter everywhere; only the media checks vary.
What if something slips through?
Fix it, then add the check. An incident that does not change the process will happen again. See about.
Should the checklist be shared with clients?
It can be, and it usually reassures them. It also sets a fair expectation of what is and is not checked before publishing.