Vale social media house rules
Please note due to the evolving nature of social media, these house rules are subject to frequent review. Last published Friday 29 November 2024.
Vale of White Horse District Council has the following Corporate social media accounts:
- X/Twitter
- LinkedIn (including a join account with Vale of White Horse District Council)
- Nextdoor
- YouTube
- WhatsApp channel
We also run The Beacon Arts Centre social media accounts: Facebook, X/Twitter and Instagram.
Our Food Safety team run the following X/Twitter account.
Our Economic Development team has a Facebook and X/Twitter account.
Our Active Communities team has a Facebook page.
Our approach
We believe that social media is an important part in how people live their lives and communicate with each other and the world around them.
We’re adaptable and continually changing how we improve the way we work and how we communicate with our residents and other organisations. We pride ourselves in being open and transparent and working in an inclusive way.
We’ve devised a set of ‘house rules’ on how we’ll use social media and how we expect people to use it too.
What we’ll do
We list our social media accounts above.
We’ll confirm it is us: if you can see a Vale of White Horse District Council account online you can check it is us by emailing communications@southandvale.gov.uk
You can also find alternative ways to contact the council here.
We’ll listen
We’ll read all messages and look to flag any queries, problems, compliments or feedback with the most relevant part of the council.
We’ll say when we’ll monitor each account. We’ll not be online 24-hours a day. But we will say when we’ll be online on each social media account we use. We generally monitor our accounts during working hours, Monday to Thursday 9am to 5pm (Friday until 4.30pm).
If you have an urgent issue during office hours we recommend you visit our contact page here for contact details. You can also find information for out of hours contacts.
We try and respond where we can and when we can help. If possible, we’ll respond on the same working day but resolving an issue may take longer if we need to find out further information. We don’t have the resources to respond to every comment although we always aim to respond to specific questions related to council services or put you in touch with colleagues or other organisations who can help.
We’ll be human and polite
We’ll treat each message with the politeness you’d expect if you were dealing with us face-to-face or on the telephone.
We’ll follow organisations/individuals where we can. But this doesn’t mean endorsement.
We’ll be accessible
We’ll make sure the content we post is accessible to all, such as using alternative text with images and captioning videos. We’ll ensure our posts are in plain English and not in any of those fonts that make them hard to read. If the way we format our social media posts makes them difficult for you to understand, please let us know.
What we’d like you to do in return
We’d like you to be polite. We know that sometimes things don’t go to plan, and you’ll want to flag things up with us. But do remember, we’re human and the person monitoring the social media account is only trying to help. So are other people who use social media. Our social media accounts are currently monitored by the council’s communications team, so depending on the nature of your enquiry, we will most likely need to contact other services within the council in order to help you. Sometimes, if you have a comment or question about why the council does things in a particular way, your local councillor might be the best person to contact.
We’d like you to be respectful
We won’t tolerate abusive language, threats, hate, accusations online just as we don’t offline. We will remove unlawful or offensive posts. We will not engage with comments that are deliberately designed to be offensive, disparaging or antagonistic.
If we believe it to be necessary, we may choose to pass details of any abusive or hate-related posts to our community safety team who may then raise the concerns with the police.
We won’t always be able to deal with your query on social media. We’ll direct you to other channels instead if this is the case.
We will not tolerate personal attacks on an individual on our social media channels. The public are free to criticise the organisation and council decisions, but we will not tolerate individual members of staff being tagged or named in critical/abusive social media posts. Even if you believe you’re being measured and even-handed, somebody reading your post might choose not to be. In some circumstances we retain the right to switch off the ability to make comments where comments threads are offensive. If you’ve a complaint to make you can do so here on our official complaints page.
We’d like you not to spam or advertise on our social media channels. Making the same points over and over particularly across different unrelated council posts – otherwise known as spamming – isn’t for our social media. You’ll be better off making a complaint or contacting us another way so we can look into the issue for you.
We’d like you to not over-share. If you’ve got an issue, we’ll happily look into it. But be careful not to post private information about yourself or others.
Of course, most of the time social media works fine but on the rare occasion where you don’t stick to the ‘house rules’, we reserve the right to delete offending content and block you from contacting us through that route. This is the same way we would treat any other repetitive inappropriate correspondence.
We also reserve the right to screen shot content and contact police if we believe the content to be of a criminal nature (such as hate crimes).
If you have any questions about our social media or feel a post may be taken down unfairly email us at communications@southandvale.gov.uk
