Health Care

Corewell Health boosts brand sentiment by 50% with a smart social strategy

From navigating industry regulations to combating misinformation and maintaining brand consistency, managing social media for a leading healthcare system is a major undertaking for any team.

Now imagine doing all that while merging and rebranding two health systems spanning 21 hospitals, 300+ outpatient centers, and a combined workforce of 65,000. 

Before merging with Beaumont Health, Spectrum Health had relied for years on Hootsuite’s Enterprise platform, analytics, compliance tools, and social listening to build trusting relationships, navigate HIPAA regulations, and promote wellness on social media. 

So when it came time to consolidate the two organizations’ social media strategies, chart a unified course forward, and launch the new Corewell brand, the team once again turned to Hootsuite.

Facing the challenge of leading two workforces through the uncertainty and confusion of a simultaneous merger and rebrand, Corewell Health looked to its newly integrated social team to manage communications to both internal and external audiences. 

To ensure a successful transition, the team designed a three-step plan:  

1. Simplify content management by centralizing and streamlining social channels and workflows

2. Build positive sentiment around the new brand with social content and engagement based on real-time audience insights

3. Grow reach, engagement, and trust by empowering employees across the organization to share on-brand content

Working with Hootsuite’s Professional Services team, Corewell Health took inventory of its social media channels, identifying which could be consolidated under the new brand and which should continue to exist separately. 

To handle the increased content volume while ensuring all posts and engagement stayed on brand, the team set up new review and approval workflows. Now, Corewell’s relatively lean social team can monitor contributor conversations, assign messages, collaborate on social content, and report on performance, all from a single, central platform.

This central view also helped the social team refocus its strategy and calendar to reduce redundant content and focus on quality over quantity. And the new approach is working: Despite reducing content volume by 61% compared to previous years, engagement has increased across Corewell Health’s social channels.

“With a small, dedicated social team following the merger, Hootsuite enables all of us to review content for consistency across our brand voice, ensure messaging remains clear and concise, and avoid carryover language from our legacy organizations.” explains Joseph Wesolek, Corewell Health’s Social Media & Reputation Manager.

Using Hootsuite Analytics, the social team uncovered a key insight: amid changing brand and hospital names, engagement consistently centered around the organization’s team members. 

In other words, Corewell Health’s people were the unifying factor between the old and new brand — and keeping them front and center in social content was the key to driving continued engagement and brand loyalty.

Monitoring topics and keywords across social channels also helped the team spot potential reputational risks early and take action to mitigate them. Through reports that analyzed audience demographics, engagement, and sentiment, they were able to understand and monitor reactions to the new brand language and imagery across multiple regions. When negative sentiment appeared, the team could spot it early and adjust its regional content strategy accordingly to shift perception and reinforce a positive image.

To tap into the collective reach and influence of its team members, Corewell Health launched an employee advocacy program powered by Hootsuite Amplify. The program makes it easy for people across the organization to share pre-approved content across their own social networks, encouraging them to take an active role in promoting the organization’s new brand identity. 

Employee advocacy programs like this can dramatically expand organizations’ social reach, and Corewell Health is no exception: Amplify posts shared by team members receive substantially more impressions than content posted on corporate channels.

The team has also started using Amplify to enhance their executives’ thought leadership content on social, creating new opportunities to foster more authentic and engaging relationships between Corewell’s leadership and team members — both within the industry and more broadly with the communities they serve.

“We have invested years in social. We know that people connect with people, and they trust each other more than a faceless corporate identity. So, enabling our people to share content through Amplify means it’s bound to go much further,” says Michael Yoder, Corewell Health’s Lead Digital Marketing Specialist - Social Media.

Using Hootsuite to manage its social media strategy and content throughout the rebranding process, Corewell Health has seen an exponential improvement in performance: 

• 50% decline in negative sentiment since the merger went into effect, from 14% in 2022 to 7% in 2024 

• 155% higher engagement rate than healthcare and wellness industry benchmark (4.76% vs. industry benchmark of 1.87%)

• 3M+ impressions on content shared by team members using Amplify 

Hootsuite’s tools have also enabled the Corewell social team to look beyond the rebrand and plan for the future. With the ability to spot, understand, and respond to high-performing content and topics, the team can strategically jump on emerging trends, uncover new opportunities for engagement, and further optimize their strategy — helping them build and strengthen Corewell Health’s reputation across the communities it serves for years to come.