Reading Council

View our social media house rules: www.reading.gov.uk/contact-us/social-media-house-rules/. We believe that social media is an important part in how people live their lives. At Reading Council we’re adaptable and continually changing how we improve the way we work. We’ve a set of house rules on how we use social media and how we expect people to use it too. https://www.reading.gov.uk/SocialMedia

What we’ll do:

We’ll confirm it is us: if you can see a Reading Council account online you can check it is us. We’ll listen:

We’ll read all messages and look to flag-up problems with the most relevant part of the organisation. We’re keen to hear from you. We’ll say when we’ll monitor each account. We’ll not be online 24-hours a day. But we will say when we’ll be online on each social media account we use. We generally monitor our accounts during working hours, Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm. If you have an emergency during office hours we recommend you call us 0118 937 3787. If you have an emergency outside of our working hours call our out-of-hours emergency team on 0118 937 3737. We try and respond where we can and when we can help. If possible we’ll respond on the same day but resolving an issue may take longer if we need to find out further information. We don’t always respond to every comment although we always aim to respond to direct service-related queries. We’ll be human and polite

We’ll treat each message with the politeness you’d expect if you were dealing with us face-to-face or on the telephone. We’ll follow people where we can. But this doesn’t mean endorsement. What we’d like you to do in return

We’d like you to be polite. We know that sometimes things don’t go to plan and you’ll want to flag things up with us. But do remember, we’re human and the person monitoring the social media account is only trying to help. So are other people who use social media. We’d like you not be anti-social

We won’t tolerate swearing, threats or abuse online just as we don’t offline. We will remove unlawful or offensive posts. We will not engage with comments that are deliberately designed to be offensive or antagonistic. We won’t always be able to deal with your query on social media. We’ll direct you to other channels instead if this is the case. We will not tolerate personal attacks on an individual on our social media channels. If you’ve a complaint to make against a named person you can do so here on our official complaints page. We’d like you not to spam or advertise. Our social media channels aren’t the place for followers to advertise. Making the same points over and over – otherwise known as spamming – isn’t for our social media. You’ll be better off making a complaint or contacting us another way so we can look into the issue for you. We’d like you to not over-share. If you’ve got an issue we’ll happily look into it. But be careful not to post private information about yourself or others. Of course, most of the time social media works fine but on the rare occasion where you don’t stick to the house rules we reserve the right to delete offending content and block you from contacting us through that route. We also reserve the right to screen shot content and contact police. If you have any questions about our social media or feel a post may be taken down unfairly email us at [email protected]