Review and approve a post

Check posts your team sends for approval, then approve them or send them back with feedback.

Before you start

• Make sure approvals are set up in your workspace. If they aren't, Post Approval shows Set up approvals instead of a list. See Configure an approval workflow.
• Check you're in the right workspace.

Open the feature

Choose Publish in the left sidebar, then Post Approval.

Steps

1. Choose the Pending tab to see posts waiting for review.
2. To find a post faster, use Sort By (Newest to Oldest or Oldest to Newest) or Filter By.
3. Read the post's text, media, accounts and time on its card.
4. To approve, click Approve. To add a note for the author, open the arrow next to Approve, choose Approve with comment, type your comment and click Approve.
5. To reject the post, click Decline. Type your feedback under Reason for declining: and click Decline. Open Declined to check the result; declining does not approve the next stage.
6. If the post's time has already passed, click Approve. Pick a new date and time, or choose Post immediately, then click Confirm.

Remind approvers about a waiting post

If a post is going through an approval workflow and it's still waiting, you can email the approvers of its current stage. This is only available for posts in an approval workflow. See Configure an approval workflow.

1. Choose Calendar in the left sidebar and find the post.
2. Click View status next to Waiting for approval, or click the eye icon next to Post history:. Post History opens.
3. Under Approval stages, find the stage marked pending and click Send approval reminder.

Review across workspaces and act in bulk

Use Current Workspace or All Workspaces to choose the review scope. The weekly approved and declined cards summarize recent decisions. Open a post's comments panel to read the discussion before deciding.

Select the intended pending posts before using the bulk Approve or Decline action, and review the selected scope in the confirmation. Bulk decisions require the appropriate team-management permission. Individual card actions remain dependent on the post state; past-due approval can publish immediately.

Expected result

An approved post moves to the Approved tab and goes on to publish at its scheduled time. A declined post moves to the Declined tab with your reason, so the author can fix it. In a multi-step workflow, the post moves to the next stage until the last stage approves it.

After Send approval reminder you see Email reminder sent successfully, and the approvers of the pending stage get an email.

Example

Your teammate sends a sale post with the wrong end date. Open Publish > Post Approval > Pending, find the post and click Decline. Type "Please change the end date to Sunday" under Reason for declining: and click Decline. The post moves to the Declined tab with your note for the author.

Limits and permissions

Post Approval requires a plan with team features. You can also open it from Calendar > Post Approval.

• In a multi-step workflow, only the approvers for the post's current stage see Approve and Decline.
• Approve All and Decline All act on every pending post at once. You need the Manage Team permission in the workspace you have open to use them. With All Workspaces selected, a team member acts only on the workspaces where they have Manage Team; the account owner acts on every workspace.
• Your decline reason can be up to 300 characters.
• Editing a post never approves it; only an approver can. If you edit a scheduled or queued post that requires approval, it goes back to Pending and must be reviewed again before it can publish. This includes Auto-Queue posts. When the post repeats, each upcoming repeat that gets your edit goes back to Pending too and needs its own approval. Approving the post again does not create its repeats a second time.
• You can send one approval reminder per hour. After a successful reminder, wait one hour from that send before sending another. A failed request does not restart the timer in the open dialog; the server still enforces its reminder limit.
• View status and the post history are available to the person who created the post and to team members who can manage the team.
• The assistant doesn't change a post that needs approval, is approved or is in an approval workflow, or any post while the workspace's approval workflow is on. Its caption, first comment, network options and media stay as they are, and the assistant asks you to edit the post in Calendar so the change goes through approval again.

Troubleshooting

• You don't see Approve or Decline on a post: the post is at a stage you're not an approver for, or it's already been approved or declined.
• You see "This post's social profile isn't in a workspace you can access" when you approve or decline: the post's social account is in a workspace you're not a member of. Ask your workspace owner to add you to that workspace, or to move the account into yours, then try again.
• A post is still pending after you approved it: your workspace uses a multi-step workflow and the next stage still needs to approve it.
• You cannot find the decline reason on the list card: open the post in Calendar, then choose View status to read its approval-stage history and rejection reasons.
• You don't see Send approval reminder: wait until an hour has passed since the post was sent for approval or since the last reminder, then open Post History again.
• Approving with a new time says Social Champ couldn't confirm whether the post published: the post may already be live, so its time isn't changed. Check the social account first. If the post isn't there, open the post's menu in Calendar, click Duplicate post and schedule the copy.
• The list is empty but you expected posts: click Clear filters, then check you're in the right workspace.