Goals and Strategies

Our goal is to promote what sets Vanderbilt apart, and to encourage fans to become brand ambassadors. That is why we share human interest stories about our students, faculty, staff and alumni. For these posts, we keep our tone mostly light-hearted and create content that shows the Vanderbilt personality. Because we are located in Nashville, America’s “It City,” we also share highlights from our booming hometown. We also, whenever appropriate, elevate our community’s posts about the university using the main university channels, thereby giving them additional recognition while sharing high-quality, user-generated content with our audiences. Some of our best stories/posts come from watching what our students do on their own. That is why we encourage our community to use our branded hashtags such as #vandygram, #VU2026, #VU4Life and #AnchorDown.

Our goal is to be aware of the sentiment towards the Vanderbilt name and brand, and try to positively influence it. We constantly track conversations about Vanderbilt so that we can listen and respond as needed. We strive to participate in these conversions by responding, providing customer service and sharing compelling stories that engage our audience. We analyze previous conversions and reevaluate to improve future communications.

Our goal is to increase awareness of Vanderbilt University among various audiences that include prospective students, current students, parents, faculty, staff, alumni, the Nashville community and beyond. We leverage our social media platforms to engage our audiences as we introduce and reinforce the Vanderbilt brand. The best way to encourage our audiences to engage with us is to create content that is timely and relevant. Whether it’s sharing news about a student-created coffee app on National Coffee Day, or giving our Commodores a pre- or post-game “Anchor Down,” our best-performing posts are timed carefully in conjunction with what’s going on in our community, our country and our world. In addition, all of our efforts are designed to support the initiatives and vision of the university.

One of Vanderbilt’s strengths is its size: ten outstanding schools and colleges all connected by a compact central campus. Our goal is to work together and give our social media content maximum effectiveness. That is why @VanderbiltU often retweets and reposts content from our faculty, staff, alumni and other university accounts. See a list of all affiliated university accounts. Consider following and sharing from these accounts as appropriate.

Our goal is to position Vanderbilt as a leading research institution among its peers by sharing research stories. That is why we share videos, experts in the news, undergraduate research stories, faculty profiles, awards and recognitions and interdisciplinary news in order to highlight the great work that’s going on at our university.

We use social media platforms to ensure that emergency communications reach our community in the quickest way possible. We convey information to our students, faculty, staff and community during an active emergency, provide information in the aftermath of an emergency, and serve in conjunction with texts, alerts and website information. We also use social media to monitor conversations about controversies and crises and use that information to inform our overall communications strategy in relation to those events and topics.