Euroa Member Steph Ryan criticised the fact the change only affects regional stations and areas – not their city counterparts.

 “I’d like to see consistency in however they approach policies between the city and country,” she said.

“If ABC keeps its city but not country accounts then that’s disappointing as obviously their regional presence is incredibly important to us.

“I’m sure many people follow the regional outlets, I know I do to stay up to date with what is happening in your own community.”

An ABC spokesman said they were choosing to focus their resources and activities on Facebook and digital online sites. 

“We have been looking at all our social media accounts across all platforms to assess their effectiveness and to remove duplication of content,” he said.

“We have decided to close our regional station Twitter accounts primarily due to very low audience engagement. 

“We will focus instead on supporting our reporters and presenters to develop their own individual ABC presence on the platform. 

“We have found this to be a more effective use of this social media platform.”

State-based ABC Country Hour Facebook pages were also merged into a single page, ABC Rural. 

“All these decisions have been made in response to the trends we are seeing from our audiences,” he said.

“We are confident they will result in the strengthening of our services to regional Australia through the concentration of our resources to those areas where there is the most audience interest.”

The ABC quashed claims they would be separating ABC Goulburn Murray into two entities; ABC Albury-Wodonga and ABC Shepparton. 

But ABC confirmed they were ‘refreshing’ their regional brand, with new branding to be rolled out later this year. 

“We can categorically say we are not splitting our regional stations in your region,” he said.