Social media policy

Our Twitter account (@SCOAF_UK) is monitored Monday-Friday 9am-5pm, excluding any period where our office is closed e.g. Christmas leave period or bank holidays.

Please be aware that this account is monitored by staff who have additional duties. As such, you will not always receive an immediate response to your tweet and we won’t always respond to every tweet we receive or that mentions us.

We will always be polite in our tweets, and as helpful as we can be, and ask that you do the same.

We won’t tweet any information that we have not verified as being accurate or link to any research that we have not read ourselves.

We will take on board any and all feedback you provide on our work and our website.

If you follow us on Twitter we will not automatically follow you back. If we do follow you, this does not imply an endorsement of any kind by SCOAF.

If you follow us, our tweets include the following topics:

• SCOAF alerts, including content in the Ombudsman blog, statistical reports, publications, events and news
• Highlighting our stakeholder information including policy changes, news and sector training opportunities.
• Re-tweets from other Twitter users that support the work of SCOAF or that contain information that we may think might be of interest to our followers and wider networks. This includes information about matters that are outside the Ombudsman’s jurisdiction.
• Recruitment – vacancies in our office

Our Direct Messages aren’t open. If you want to contact us, use the details on the Contact Us page

Due to the character limit on Twitter, we can’t give you a detailed response to questions about the Service complaints process or the role of the Ombudsman. However, we will direct you to where you can find this information or give you contact details for our team where appropriate.

We will engage with as many people as we can, but we won’t engage where the content of tweets are abusive, offensive or where the nature of the tweets constitute harassment. We don’t want to block people from following us, but we may have no choice but to block accounts that tweet continued abuse.

We do not accept complaints via Twitter.

We will not use Twitter to discuss matters relating to specific complaints. If a complainant wishes to discuss a specific case, the usual ways of contacting SCOAF is detailed on the Contact Us.

Please remember that the Ombudsman has a limited remit. If you are seeking information, or wish to complain, about the Ministry of Defence (MOD) or you are a member of the public seeking to make a complaint, you can find information about the MOD complaints procedure here:

SCOAF’s Twitter account is not intended to be used by the media to contact us, if you are a journalist and want to know more about the Ombudsman’s work, please use the contact details below.

Email: CommsOfficer@scoaf.org.uk

We regularly review our social media policy. If we make any significant changes to this document we will advertise this on our website. But you are advised to check our website regularly to read the most recent social media policy. This social media notice was last updated on 22nd February 2019.