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Come see #whatwedo (you can even do it without leaving the house)

If you’ve ever wondered what your council does in a day beyond dealing with waste and providing school education, you’ll soon have the chance to find out.

Aberdeenshire Council is taking part in a 24-hour Twitter event where councils from across Scotland will tweet about the services they provide.

The event, called #whatwedo, is designed to raise awareness about the huge range of services provided by councils to people across the country.

The event will take place from noon on Tuesday, September 27 until noon the following day.

Employees from across Aberdeenshire Council will take a few seconds out to tweet about their services from the frontline or tweet useful information for residents.

Aberdeenshire Council’s Twitter followers will get a unique view of the daily scope of council activities as diverse as road repairs, nurseries and trading standards.

The council already has around 2,800 followers on its main Twitter feed, @aberdeenshire

It’s one way we have of informing residents about our services. It’s also where we can announce urgent information, such as road and school closures.

Twitter is a micro-blogging social network where users can post tweets of up to 140 characters. These often contain links to other content such as website pages and photographs.

People who do not already have a Twitter account can find out more about it and sign up (it’s free) at www.twitter.com/about

On the day, all the councils taking part will be using a specific hashtag (#whatwedo) to group their tweets together.

Councillor Anne Robertson, leader of Aberdeenshire Council, said: “Councils provide literally hundreds of services around the clock, 365 days a year, and this event will give service users a chance to see one day in the life of a council.

“We face challenging financial times and it’s important people understand the kinds of services we provide, even faced with those challenges.

“It’s very easy for people to focus only on the services they directly receive but there are so many more.

“Residents may also be surprised at the extent of our services and by the commitment which so many council employees demonstrate every working day.”

Chief executive Colin Mackenzie added: “Social networks like Twitter are going to become more and more important as a way for people to access our services.

“What We Do gives us the opportunity to experiment with communicating in this way and we want people to let us know what they think.

“We hope people will join in, whether they watch what’s going on from the sidelines or get actively involved in the conversation.”

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