Article updated: December 02, 2024
Approve content before it goes live
An approval process helps ensure you publish mistake-free, polished, on-brand content. Once your organization admin has set up an approval process, and you've been asked to approve a post, you can go to Plan, and then select Approvals from the top of the page to view, edit, approve, and reject content.
Plans: Business and Enterprise
You can assign permissions to help control off-brand or accidental communications to your social accounts. Members assigned the Limited or Responder permission must have their content approved before it can be published via Hootsuite or sent in Inbox 2.0.
If you're an organization admin, and you want to set up an approval process, see Set up an approval process.
Authors and Inbox 2.0 agents get a notification when someone approves or rejects their content. You can customize notifications for both approvers and authors. Learn how to customize notifications.
Approve, edit, or reject content
View, edit, approve, and reject content in your content calendar.
- Go to Plan
, select your organization, and then select Approvals.
- Select to view content with approvals that are Assigned to you, Created by you, Rejected, or Expired. You can filter your approvals by post type, social account, or by date using the options at the top of the page.
- Rejected - Shows rejected content with notes from the approver. Authors can edit the content and resend it for approval. Content rejected by or waiting for approval from Proofpoint appears here.
- Expired - Shows content that was not approved before its scheduled publish time or was pending approval for longer than 90 days. The author, or any organization admin, can edit or delete the content.
- Select the content to view it. To edit the content before you approve it, open a post, and then select Edit
from the top of the page. You cannot edit private messages, comments, and replies (you can only approve or reject them).
- Select Approve
or Reject
.
Unless a second or third approval is part of your process, approved content publishes (or gets scheduled) right away. If you have a second approver, they receive the approval request after the first approves the content. Likewise, the third approver receives an approval request after the second has approved the content.
Note: Make sure you approve scheduled posts with ample time for them to publish. You'll need to approve posts at least 5 minutes (videos 15 minutes) before they are scheduled to publish. Otherwise, you'll have to wait until they appear in the Expired queue.
Getting asked to approve the same post more than once?
You may be asked to approve a post twice. This can happen if the post author has Limited permissions and asked you to approve their post even though your organization already had an approval process set up.
View approval history
Approval history tracks who sends, edits, and approves posts. To view approval history for comments, replies, and private messages, open those items in Inbox 2.0.
- Go to Plan
- Select the content, and then select View approval history.
Find content waiting for approval in your content calendar. You can filter scheduled content by approval status using the filter on the top left. You should note the following about approval status:
- Rejected - Shows rejected content with notes from the approver. Authors can edit the content and resend it for approval. Content rejected by or waiting for approval from Proofpoint appears here.
- Expired Approvals - Shows content that was not approved before its scheduled publish time. The author, or any organization admin, can edit or delete the content in the web version of Hootsuite.
Approve, edit, or reject content
View, edit, approve, and reject content in your content calendar.
- Go to Plan
- Select the post status filter, choose Require my approval, and then select Done.
- Select the content.
- Select Approve or Reject. Select More (three dots) in the top right to make edits before approving the content.
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