Social media governance
Replying and responding to messages
We generally monitor our social media accounts between 9am and 5pm, Monday to Friday, except on public holidays. Our accounts are occasionally monitored outside these hours, for example at an event or council meeting.
We always try to respond to as many comments as we can. However, we do receive a lot of social media traffic, which means this isn't always possible and we can sometimes miss posts.
Our media team, who run our social media accounts, will sometimes pass your questions to other colleagues to find out information for you. This means that there could be a delay in getting the information, so please be patient – we will do our best to get back to you as quickly as possible. Even if we do not reply, we are listening and will act on or pass on your comments as appropriate.
Liking and following
Please don't be offended if we don't like or follow you, it doesn't mean we don't like you or are not interested in what you have to say. It's just the number of accounts is too high for us to follow everyone.
We frequently follow people who provide information that is relevant to our work as a local authority (for example government agencies, local media, and our other public sector partners) or those whose information we can pass on that will benefit you.
Occasionally, we'll try to lend our support to local and national campaigns. There will be times we'll need to like or follow an account in order to take part in conversations.
Please remember that while we may like or follow someone, it doesn't mean that we endorse them.
Blocking and unfollowing
We try to avoid blocking social media accounts but occasionally we may take this action where an individual has repeatedly contravened the rules of a social media platform. Please don’t take it personally if for some reason we unfollow you. We regularly go through a review of accounts to simply cut down on numbers.
Sharing and retweeting
We try to share or retweet information that we think will be of interest or use to you and Rochdale borough businesses. However, if we don't retweet something you ask us to, don't be offended. it's important that we remain impartial and protect the council's reputation. Therefore, we cannot endorse any particular view, individual or organisation. Sharing information can be seen as an endorsement and it's important that we remain impartial and protect the council's reputation.
Retweeting or sharing someone's information doesn't mean that we endorse them.
Moderation
Although we always follow the normal rules and guidelines of social media platforms, we also have some of our own rules. These are:
- Don't post messages that are unlawful, defamatory or libellous, abusive, threatening, harmful, obscene, profane, sexually-oriented or racially offensive.
- Don't bully, harass or intimidate any individual or organisation.
- Don't impersonate someone else.
- Don't swear.
- Be civil, tasteful and relevant.
- 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, repeatedly.
- Don't publicise your, or anyone else's, personal information, such as contact details.
- Don't advertise products or services.
- Don't post any political comments.
If these rules are not followed, we will use the measures of protection and intervention the platform already has in place, for example flagging comments or alerting them to any breaches of the platform's terms and conditions.
Please be aware, we reserve the right to remove any contributions that break the rules of the relevant community, or any of our guidelines.
Defamatory comments
We take defamatory statements posted on any of our sites very seriously, so we ask you to take care when posting on our pages. By publishing such a statement we can both get into serious trouble. We will, therefore, take down any statement that we consider could be deemed to be defamatory.
Political neutrality
The council itself, as opposed to its political administration, must be politically neutral in its communications. Therefore, please do not use any of our pages to promote party political messages or other content.
We will remove any comments that in our view, may compromise our obligation to maintain political neutrality.