WEB-based communication such as blogs, forums, social media and social networking sites are becoming more prominent and Tweed Shire Council has decided to add this way of interacting with residents to its arsenal by adopting an online and social media policy.

The policy provides guidelines on council's use of web-based communication tools and applies to council officials, councillors, staff and members of committees.

One of the policy's goals is to ensure official websites are easily identified through the use of council's corporate brand including sub-brands such as the Tweed River Art Gallery and the Tweed Regional Aquatic Centre.

The council decided to use social media sites for functions such as informing the community about events, careers at council, community engagement, emergency information including road closures, status updates of sports field closures and other changes to council's operations.

Staff will remove any content from any of its sites if contributions contain content such as comments which are defamatory, abusive, discriminatory or unlawful.

The council warned that ongoing abuse or spamming of its social media sites would result in the contributor being removed and permanently blocked from council's social media sites.

The adoption of the policy doesn't mean council will soon have a Facebook site up and running anytime soon, it just sets the parameters for proper behaviour and use of these social media tools.

No funding has been allocated to the sites and it's unclear when council will start using social media.