Set it up once
Put it on the calendar as a recurring block with one person’s name on it. We’d recommend writing your notes during the session rather than after, since half the posts checked and fully recorded is worth more than every post checked and nothing written down.
Usually whoever runs the creator program. Not legal. Legal should see the summary and the hard calls, not three hundred captions. If legal is doing the reviewing, the review will not happen monthly.
The first week of the month, covering the month before. Same week every time so people stop asking.
For a program under a hundred posts a month, plus about half an hour for the performance and theme read. If your number is much bigger, sample instead of skipping the review.
What you need open
- Your list of active creators, including affiliates and anyone you sent product to
- The posts from last month, however you get at them
- Your claims list and disclosure rules, so you are checking against something written
- Wherever you keep flags, even if that is a spreadsheet
- Last month's review, so you can see what repeated
Pull the month and decide what you're looking at
Start by writing down how many posts went up and how many you are going to check. That second number is your coverage, and it belongs in the record.
Getting the posts. Whichever way you do this, the goal is a list you can work through, not a feeling that you have seen most of it. Export from your affiliate tool, search your brand name and your hashtags by hand, or connect accounts if you have something that pulls posts in. Note which method you used, because it tells you what you missed.
Do not forget the people you never paid. Search your brand name, your product names, and your discount codes. Anyone using a code you did not issue is in your program whether you like it or not.
If the number is too big to check everything
Sample, and say so. A sample you designed is fine. A sample that happens to be whoever you remembered is not. Build it like this:
Everything from anyone with a flag in the last three months
Everything from your top ten creators by sales, because volume means reach
Everything in your highest-risk category, if some products carry more risk than others
A random slice of the rest, and write down the percentage
PinkSpider can do this part for you. The platform monitors your paid, gifted, and affiliate creators continuously, so the list is already built and searched by the time you sit down to review it, instead of pulled together by hand once a month.
Check in severity order
Look for the things that can hurt you first. If you run out of time, you want to have run out of time on the small stuff.
The caption is usually the safest part of a post. The line worth flagging tends to be spoken in the video or shown on screen for a second or two, so we’d suggest watching and listening rather than reading alone. If you only have time for captions this month, it’s worth noting that alongside your coverage number.
Each flag needs the creator, the link, the date, what is wrong, how bad it is, and the fix. Save a copy of the post as you go. If you come back in six months and it has been deleted, your record is the only thing left.
Sort and act
Every flag goes in one of four buckets before you leave the session, and every bucket has a next step with a date.
Disease claims, income promises, anything a regulator would read as a health or money guarantee. Ask for removal, not an edit, and keep your copy. Send these the same day you find them.
Missing or weak disclosure, off-brief wording, a claim that can be reworded into something approved. Tell the creator exactly what to change and by when. Give them a week.
A creator with the same small mistake two or three times running does not need a scarier email. They need to be shown what right looks like. Send the training again and note that you did.
Posts from people you never signed, and judgment calls you are not sure about. Do not let this bucket become a place where things go to be forgotten.
Send it all at once. Batch your outreach at the end of the session rather than emailing as you go. It is faster, the tone stays even, and you can see if you are about to send four notes to the same person. Record the date you sent each one, and quote the exact line you want changed so the creator can act on it right away.
Five numbers
Track the same five numbers every month. The trend is the point, not the number itself.
What good movement looks like
Coverage steady or climbing. Flags per hundred posts going down over a few months. Days to fix under a week. If flags per hundred posts is flat for three months, your fixes are not landing, and the problem is upstream in the brief or the training.
Your flag count will likely go up over the first few months. That’s a sign you’re catching more, not that creators are doing worse. We’d recommend sharing that context the first time you report the number, so the trend reads the way you intend.
Read performance next to the flags
A review that never looks at results gets treated as overhead, and overhead is the first thing cut. You already have the month’s posts open. Ten more minutes tells you which content actually worked, and whether the content that works is the content that worries you.
Pull the same numbers your marketing team already reports, per post: views, engagement rate, clicks, orders and sales, conversion rate, and cost per order or return on spend. You are not building a new dashboard. You are joining two lists you already have.
Three comparisons worth making
Your top sellers against their flags
Take the ten posts that sold the most and look at what they claimed. If your best month came from language you cannot keep, that is the single most useful sentence in the whole review.
Clean posts against flagged posts
Average engagement and sales for each group. If flagged content wins by a wide margin, you have a briefing problem to solve upstream, not a discipline problem to solve one creator at a time.
Fixed posts, before and after
Did moving a disclosure to the first line cost anything? Almost always no. Being able to show that with your own numbers is how you win the next argument about whether compliance slows the program down.
Themes against the campaign strategy
Compliance tells you whether a post was allowed. Themes tell you whether it was the post you asked for. Most programs never check the second thing, and then wonder why the campaign did not feel like the campaign.
Write down the three or four message pillars from the brief. Tag every post you reviewed with the one pillar it actually led with, plus a bucket for none of the above. One tag per post, the one a viewer would say it was about. Keep the same five labels every month so the numbers stay comparable. This takes about twenty minutes and it is the part your marketing lead will read first.
Coverage per pillar
Which pillar got made, and which one you paid for and never got.
Off-strategy share
The share of posts leading with something you never asked for. Above a third, the brief is not being read or not being followed.
Performance by pillar
Which theme sells, not which theme you liked in the kickoff deck.
Flags by pillar
If nearly every flag sits under one pillar, that pillar is pulling creators toward risky language. The pillar is the problem.
What each combination tells you to do
The monthly brief
One page, same shape every month, sent to whoever above you would be in the room if something went wrong. Most people skip this because nobody asked for it. Send it anyway. It takes ten minutes, it is the thing that proves the program existed, and it quietly makes the case for resourcing better than any request ever will.
What goes on it
- The month, and who ran the review
- Posts published, posts reviewed, and the percentage
- Flags by severity, with last month's numbers next to them
- The two or three worst items and what you did about each
- One line on performance: what sold, and whether the fixes cost anything
- Theme coverage against the brief, and the off-strategy share
- Anything still open and why
- One line on what you are changing next month
What to leave off. Every individual flag. Nobody reads a list of three hundred captions, and a huge appendix makes the summary look like a problem instead of a report. Keep the detail where you can produce it if asked.
Who gets it. Your manager, whoever owns legal or regulatory, and the agency if one runs part of the program. Same people every month. The point of a routine report is that people stop reacting to it and start expecting it.
When to fix the rules instead of the posts
If the same flag shows up three months in a row, stop correcting creators and go change something upstream. A repeated flag across many different creators is almost never a discipline problem. It means your instructions are unclear, or missing, or contradicted by something else they were sent.
Everybody puts the disclosure in the wrong place. Your brief probably says “disclose clearly” instead of “first line of the caption, before the more button.”
Everybody uses the same off-limits phrase. It is probably on your own website or in the copy you gave them. Creators repeat what the brand says.
Everybody misses it on one format. Stories, lives, and podcast reads are usually the gap, because the brief was written for feed posts and never updated.
Once a quarter, pull your top three flags and ask whether the brief addresses each one in words a creator would follow. If it doesn’t, that’s the page to update. Creators read the brief, so fixing a repeat issue there usually goes further than another round of individual emails.
PinkSpider can do this part for you. The platform keeps a dated record of every review and generates the monthly numbers automatically, so the brief is a summary of what's already recorded rather than a document you have to assemble from scratch.
The SOP
Copy this into wherever your team keeps its processes.
Owner: [name] · When: first week of the month, covering the previous month · Time: 2–4 hours
This article is provided by PinkSpider for general informational and educational purposes only, and should not be considered legal advice. Advertising requirements and platform policies may vary by industry, jurisdiction, and circumstance and are subject to change. Readers should consult qualified legal counsel when evaluating compliance requirements for their specific business or marketing activities.