Our social media policy
Bridgend County Borough Council has a corporate presence on social media sites Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube to communicate with people who live in, work in and visit Bridgend County Borough.
This information explains how we manage these accounts and gives advice for followers who wish to talk to us through social media. We will occasionally update this information and we will remind followers at particular milestones eg 1,000, 2,500, 3,000 follows/likes etc, or if we think followers require updated advice.
These corporate accounts are mainly managed by members of the Communications, Marketing and Engagement team and occasionally Customer Services on behalf of the council. Tweets, posts, status updates and responses are on behalf of the council and should not be interpreted as responses/personal messages from individuals.
We will try to respond quickly to questions and queries raised through these forums. If necessary, we will signpost you to our website or Customer Services team or send your question direct to the Customer Service Centre for them to respond.
Please note if your username contains a swear word/expletive then we will not be able to reply to you or RT/share something you have asked us to.
Our social media accounts are mainly monitored during office hours, Monday to Friday. If we can we will respond outside of these hours and aim to reply to questions sent during evenings or at weekends as soon as we can. We can’t promise to respond to every comment we receive – particularly at busy times (such as when there is heavy snow affecting council services, or industrial action). If your query is serious, urgent, detailed or involves personal details, we advise you to contact our Customer Service team.
Following us on social media
Please don’t be offended if we don’t follow/like you back on social media. This doesn’t mean we don’t like you or are not interested in what you have to say, it’s just that numbers could get too high for us to be able to manage effectively.
We will sometimes follow/like people/pages that provide information that is pertinent to our work as a local authority (for example central government accounts, local media, and our partners) or those whose information we can pass on for the benefit of many local people. Occasionally, we’ll also try to lend our support to local and national campaigns.
There will also be times we’ll need to follow/like an account in order to take part in conversations.
Just because we follow/like someone, retweet or share their information, it doesn’t mean that we endorse them.
Sharing and retweeting
We try to share or retweet information that we think will be of interest or use to people in Bridgend County Borough. But please don’t be offended if we don’t retweet or share something you ask us to: as a trusted organisation, any sharing of information could be seen as endorsement of a particular view, individual or organisation, and it’s important that we remain impartial and protect the council’s reputation.
Moderation
Most online communities have their own rules and guidelines, which we will always follow.
Where possible, we will rely on the measures of protection and intervention which the social networking site already has in place (e.g. against illegal, harmful or offensive content), for example by flagging comments or alerting them to any breaches of the site’s terms and conditions. We also have some of our own rules.
We have set up our Facebook account to filter posts that contain certain words such as swear words that people might find offensive. There is the possibility that a user may still be able to post something offensive to our wall and in this instance we will act quickly to remove it and prevent similar content from appearing again.
Additionally we reserve the right to remove or ask for the removal of any contributions across social media that we consider break the rules of the relevant community, or any of the following guidelines:
- be civil, tasteful and relevant
- don’t post messages that are unlawful, libellous, harassing, offensive, defamatory, aggressive, abusive, threatening, harmful, obscene, profane, sexually oriented or racially offensive
- don’t swear
- don’t make political comments or use our social media accounts for political debate
- don’t post content copied from elsewhere, for which you do not own the copyright
- don’t post the same message, or very similar messages, more than once (also called "spamming")
- don’t publicise your, or anyone else's, personal information, such as contact details
- don’t advertise commercial products or services
- don’t impersonate someone else
Unfortunately, and as a last resort, we will occasionally need to ‘block’ users if they persistently refuse to follow these guidelines and/or do not respond to requests to remove posts which fall into the categories above.
Libel
Please take care not to make libellous statements. In law this means a statement that lowers the reputation of a person or organisation in the eyes of a reasonable person. By publishing such a statement we can both get into serious trouble. We will therefore take down or request you take down any statement that could be deemed to be libellous.
Pre-election period
Our accounts are non-political and we ask fellow users to respect this and understand that we cannot engage in any political debate. In the six-week run up to an election - local, general or European - councils have to be especially careful not to do or say anything that could seen in any way to support any political party or candidate. We will continue to publish important service announcements using social media but may have to remove responses or ask you to remove responses if they could be construed as party political or inflammatory.