Social Media

We use social network sites as another way in which we can interact and engage with residents, businesses and visitors in a way that suits them.

We interact with residents on a range of matters, our latest news, live consultations to job opportunities and live election results.

How can you connect?

We have several social media accounts:

Twitter

Facebook

Instagram

YouTube

LinkedIn

NextDoor

When do we respond?

All our social media accounts are monitored and updated between 9am to 5pm, Monday to Friday (except on Bank Holidays). Posts and messages are scheduled over the weekend and our accounts may occasionally be monitored outside these hours for an event or during emergency situations.

We will aim to acknowledge all posts and messages within one working day and aim to get a response back within a reasonable time period.

On occasions, our Communications team (who run our social media accounts), will sometimes send your questions on to other colleagues to find out the information. This may cause a delay in getting the information to you, so please bear with us; we will do our best to get back to you as soon as possible. Where applicable, we may signpost you to where the information can be found, this may be directing you to partnering organisations, our website or other websites.

If you are reporting an issue, such as fly-tipping or a missed bin collection, we encourage you to report this online.

General guidance

We share information from other websites or sources that is relevant and helpful to our work as a local authority and our residents. Occasionally, we will lend our support to local and national campaigns.

In the six week run up to elections (local, general or European) – councils have to be very careful not to do or say anything that could be seen to support any political party or candidate.

Our Moderation Policy

We encourage and welcome open, lively debate that is civil and relevant and won’t suppress legitimate debate of relevant issues and welcomes your constructive views. We also want to ensure people’s safety online, so the following guidelines have been produced.

You should:

• respect other comments and individuals – comments should not be malicious or offensive in nature, and should not constitute a personal attack on a person’s character
• be reasonably concise
• where possible, please try to use English. Unfortunately we are unable to moderate comments in other languages
• stay on-topic

You must not:

• reveal personal details, such as National Insurance numbers, private addresses, phone numbers, email addresses or other online contact details
• use social media to discuss or comment on individual personal enquiries (e.g. benefits, planning etc…)
• break the law (this includes libel), condone illegal activity or break copyright
• swear, make malicious or offensive comments
• incite hatred on the basis of race, religion, gender, nationality or sexuality or other personal characteristics
• advertise commercial products and services; you can mention relevant products and services as long as they support your comment
• impersonate or falsely claim to represent a person or organisation
• post messages that are unrelated to the topic of the original web post
• make comments which are party political in nature
• agree to meet individuals on a one to one basis without careful consideration of your personal safety
• discuss any criminal or immoral activity
• send repetitive comments on the same topic

We reserve the right to remove comments at any time for any of the above.

For serious or persistent breaches of the moderation policy, we reserve the right to prevent users from posting further comments.
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