Social Media Policy

Background

The Vale of Glamorgan Council currently uses Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn.

We use social media to help keep people informed about services and events that are important to them, as well as to share and promote the work of the organisation. We may also use our social media channels to ask for views and feedback on certain topics, such as consultations. 

Our social media channels are monitored during normal office hours. Whilst we will routinely share posts over the weekend and public holidays, our feeds are not monitored during this time and you should expect a delay in response.

Members of the public can contact us for advice on services or general queries, which will either be responded to directly or signposted to the relevant avenue. 

What you can expect from us

 Our intention is to be helpful and transparent when engaging with customers via social media. We will aim to provide a clear, concise answer to queries where possible. We avoid using jargon and write in plain English.

Where issues are not straightforward, we will relay the query to a specific department. Be aware that because of this, there may be a delay in responding to customers. 

We will not disclose any staff contact details to customers in the social media feed. If you ask to be put in contact directly with a member of staff, you will be referred to C1V or the department’s mailbox / telephone. We aim to pass on any positive feedback or comments made about our teams.

We aim to respond to genuine comments or queries, however there may be occasions where we miss some, particularly at busy times. If we do miss your query, please do not think we are deliberately ignoring you. If your query is serious, urgent, detailed or involves personal details, we advise you to contact our Customer Service team directly on 01446 700111.

There may be occasions that we decide not to respond to customers. This could be where an issue has been raised and dealt with in the past, or where there is no specific query / concern raised.

We routinely use our social media platforms as part of our consultation work. We may publish links to consultations or ask you to leave comments or respond to a poll. Where we have done this, we will collect all relevant and genuine feedback and ensure these are relayed to the team. We will not routinely engage with you on posts like these.

What we expect from you.

There are very few customers whose actions we consider unacceptable. We aim to manage these actions based on their nature and extent. In some cases, we may need to restrict that customer’s contact with us via social media.

In the first instance, we will remove messages or comments (where function allows) which we believe are:

• Abusive or obscene
• Deceptive or misleading
• In violation of any intellectual property rights, including copyright
• In violation of any law or regulation
• Off-topic content (in which the aim is to provoke a response)
• Promotional material, including links to external websites and promotions
• Names members of staff or publishes contact details of staff
• Publishes personal details
• Publishes sensitive or private information

This will be done without giving notice.

In the second instance, we will mute or block users because of engagement that we believe is:

• Extremely abusive or obscene
• Spamming (i.e. repeatedly flagging the same issue despite having provided a response)
• Received from bots

This will be done without giving notice.

In some instances, we will seek to report a user for their comment / post, where the social media platform’s guidelines advise us to do so.

All of these actions are in line with the Council’s Unreasonable Complainant Behaviour Policy and Process.