How we use Social Media

We use social media to communicate with residents, staff and partners, including profiles on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn and Instagram.

We encourage people to follow us and we post information about our work that we think our followers will find interesting.

We also use social media to respond to questions and to comments, and - where we think it's the best method - to consult with residents.

Our social media content will include:

• Information about our services, initiatives, meetings, events and campaigns
• An RSS feed from our press releases that are published on our website
• Occasionally we will repost (retweet) from other public sector/community organisations and individuals that are relevant to our followers. We have to be selective about the information we share, as it could be seen as endorsement of a particular view, individual or organisation, and it's important that we protect our impartiality.
• We reserve the right to delete any information from our page/profile/Twitter feed that we feel is inappropriate.

Our Social Media sites may occasionally be unavailable and we accept no responsibility for lack of service due to their downtime.

Liking, Following and Blocking

If you follow us on Twitter or 'like' us on Facebook we will not automatically 'follow you/like you' back - this would make the numbers too high for us to manage.

• We will sometimes follow or like people who provide information that is relevant to our work as a local authority (for example central government accounts, local media, and our partners).  We will also follow or like those whose information we can pass on for the benefit of many local people.
• Occasionally, we'll also try and lend our support to local and national campaigns that are connected to our services.
• There will also be times we'll need to like or follow an account in order to take part in conversations.
• Just because we like or follow someone, retweet or share their information, it doesn't mean that we endorse them.
• If we block your account, this will probably be because you've followed or liked the council purely to promote a product or service, or you've broken the rules of a particular social media space (see Moderation).

Monitoring accounts, responding and replying

Our main social media accounts are monitored on weekdays during office hours, others are monitored during opening hours (for example, leisure centres). If you ask us a question on social media we will respond as quickly as possible, but please be aware that:

• We can give a fuller response if you email us on customerservices@powys.gov.uk (due to the confines of tweet character lengths etc)
• Our main Powys County Council social media pages are run by the Communications Team who will send your questions to service areas to find out information for you, meaning our response may not be immediate
• If your query is serious, urgent, or involves personal information, please see our main contacts page.

Moderation

We reserve the right to remove any contributions that break the following guidelines:

• be civil, tasteful and relevant
• don't post messages that are unlawful, libellous, harassing, defamatory, abusive, threatening, harmful, obscene, profane, sexually oriented or racially offensive
• don't swear
• 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 products or services
• don't impersonate someone else

Pre-election periods

In the six-week run-up to an election - local, national, general or European - councils have to very careful not to do or say anything that could be seen to support any political party or candidate in any way. We will continue to publish important service announcements using social media but may have to remove responses if they are overtly party political.

Your social media accounts

It is your responsibility to make sure that you have the appropriate privacy restrictions set up on your social media profile/page/feed to restrict what you want other people, including the council, to see. There are many online resources to help you manage your personal information on social media; do a quick internet search for 'privacy settings on social networking sites' to find them.

_{Updated September 2019}