Social media

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.

Our social media accounts are monitored during office hours Monday to Friday - excluding bank holidays. We can't promise to respond to all comments or questions via social media so if your query is urgent or serious please contact us or report a problem using the online forms.

Social media policy

When using a social media network to contact us please be aware of their rules and guidelines.

If necessary we will use the social networking sites own tools for reporting any breaches of those terms and conditions.

We also have our own rules.

We reserve the right to remove, block or unfollow any accounts that break our guidelines. We ask that you:

• 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
• don't post any political comments

Follow, like, share

We may follow you to assist us in our communication with you. For example to allow us to DM each other on Twitter. We will probably unfollow shortly afterwards. We tend not to follow individuals or local businesses on Twitter. However, we do create public Twitter Lists of local businesses.

We try to share or retweet information we feel our followers would be interested in. However, please don't take offence if we don't retweet something you want us to. It is important that the Council remains impartial and retweets or sharing can be seen as an endorsement. If we follow, like, retweet or share it does not mean we endorse it.

Blocking and unfollowing

We may block or unfollow your account if we feel it has breached any of our social media policy rules. From time to time we may unfollow you to allow us to keep our own timeline clear.

Pre-election period

In the six week run up to an election - local, general or European - councils have to be very careful not to do or say anything that could be seen in any way to support any political party or candidate.