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Social media house rules

Home Energy Scotland has a number of social media channels so we can communicate with individuals, partners and stakeholders across Scotland. We use these channels to help households and communities across Scotland to save money on their energy bills, reduce their carbon footprint and access funding and support.

We welcome engagement on all our social media platforms however we do expect some courtesy in return. We have a set of house rules to ensure our social media channels are safe and useful for everyone.

With this in mind, please:

  • Comply with each social media platform’s terms of use alongside these house rules.
  • Only post information you’re happy for everyone to see: please contact us via private message if you need to send us your phone number, address or reference number.
  • Keep your posts on topic.
  • Keep the language appropriate.
  • Share our posts with your friends and family.

Please don’t:

  • Post personal information on the public feed.
  • Post anything unlawful, defamatory, embarrassing, or damaging to someone’s reputation, libellous, abusive, threatening, harmful, obscene, sexually oriented or racially offensive.
  • Bully, harass or intimidate any individual or organisation.
  • Spam or troll our social media accounts (this includes persistent negative or abusive posts with the intent to provoke a response).
  • Promote or advertise other services on our channels.

We will remove or hide posts that we feel are inappropriate and break our house rules. We will automatically hide any comments or replies that are abusive or use inappropriate language.

We have a duty of care over any individuals that feature on our social media channels. As such we have a zero tolerance policy when it comes to abuse. We will escalate and, when appropriate, block any accounts that direct abuse or offensive language towards any individuals - such as employees, case study subjects and customer testimonials - featured on our social media channels.

We will also remove, block, ban and report any user to the associated social media platform who:

  • Repeatedly violates our house rules.
  • Uses an offensive image as their profile picture.
  • Has an offensive username.

Monitoring and responding

Our social accounts are monitored from 9am - 4pm Monday to Friday. We read all messages and respond as appropriate. Any inquiries regarding our programmes and funding will be directed to the relevant team who may get in touch separately.

We cannot respond to every message we receive and will prioritise urgent inquiries from existing applicants. We do not routinely give advice via our social media channels however we will do our best to signpost you to where you can find more information.

Advice centre Facebook pages

Our advice centres all manage their own Facebook pages. These give you the opportunity to learn about events and partnerships in your local area. These pages are monitored by the marketing teams within each advice centre. The same house rules apply to these pages as all other Home Energy Scotland social media channels.

Likes, follows and shares

We carefully choose who we like, follow and share content from to ensure our social media channels are relevant to our audience. We have limits on how much content we can share per day and we will only like content that is relevant to the work we do.

We follow a number of organisations that we think will be of interest to our followers, as well as core partners and stakeholders. Likes, follows and shares do not indicate endorsement of any organisation or individual.

Let us know if you see anything that breaches these rules

If you see any content or comments on our social media channels that are not in accordance with these rules you may report these to us via private message or by using the reporting functions on the channel concerned or by emailing marketingscotland@est.org.uk.