Birds do it, anyone under the age of 30 does it, and now Tasmania’s Huon Valley Council is doing it too.
Council has adopted the social networking must have – Twittering – as a way to provide current and timely information to the community.
Topics Council is tweeting about include upcoming events, news, changes to Council services, road closures and reminders of upcoming meetings.
The new service has already been used to promote recent events throughout the Huon Valley, including a series of community forums, monthly Council meetings, a Family Fun Day at a local park and various Seniors Week activities.
Having only been in operation a short time, Council has 16 followers, but Community Relations Officer Jonathon Campbell said it is attracting new followers every week.
“We use Twitter in conjunction with our other communication tools to promote Council activities to the community,” he said. “It’s great we are able to offer this kind of service to our residents along with traditional forms of communication.
“As the community becomes more familiar with social media tools, such as Twitter and Facebook, they expect us to use these tools as a way to communicate with them. As a Council, it is important we understand how these social media tools work and how we can use them to better talk and listen to our community.
“Feedback we have received has been positive and the general opinion is that it is good the Council is engaging with the community via Twitter.”
Accessing Council messages, called “tweets”, requires residents to join Twitter first by visiting www.twitter.com Once this is done, they simply go to www.Twitter.com/HuonValley and click on the follow tab.
Council tweets can be received by email or via text messages on a mobile phone and is free to use other than phone carrier charges.
