Friday Pharmacy Follow: Pacific Oak Compounding Pharmacy

The Pacific Oak Pharmacy team knows how to make their social media channels fun and informative for patients.

Follow Pacific Oak Pharmacy on Instagram and Facebook!

Meet this week’s pharmacy to follow, Pacific Oak Compounding Pharmacy of Arcadia, California. The team, led by founder and CEO John Kong, PharmD., regularly shares original pictures, videos and updates that not only inform patients and customers, but shows off the upbeat personality of the pharmacy.

“My team would always comment on how happy all of our patients are when they leave our pharmacy and I attribute it to the vibe and environment we've created here,” John said.
Knowing that their pharmacy has a good vibe is great, but they wanted to find a way to convey that feeling to potential new patients and customers.

They found that social media was a great way to show their community who they are and what they’re about. When they kicked off their social media channels a few years ago, they began by sharing a lot of health-related content, but quickly started to have more fun with their posts.

“The interns are great at making it fun. Now, we do a mix of both fun content and brainy stuff’,” John said.

Over the last few years, the Pacific Oak Pharmacy team has continued to grow and learn more about how to communicate with their current customers and potential patients via social media.

John has generously shared his best practices and learnings so that other community pharmacies can use to build up their own social media presence. Below are the top six tips that John and his team learned about building up their social media presence.

Pacific Oak Pharmacy’s Top 6 Social Media Tips by John Kong, PharmD.

1. Plan! Plan out all the content you want to post at least one month ahead. Plan out which days you want to post and what kind of content (big-brain or fun). The one-month lead time will give you time to shoot and edit the content before posting.

2. Storyboard everything. The biggest mistake I made was not planning out my posts before starting to film everything. I'd shoot the same thing 50 different times just for a one minute clip. I started planning what info I wanted to present to my audience and then hashed out how I was going to present that info. Once I had an idea of how to present the info, I planned out how to shoot it. For example, what the framing will be like and how you're going to shoot the pic or vid. If you have captions that appear on the sides, is there enough room for them? How do you want to cut the video clips together? If there's music, make sure if it's music that you're allowed to use. My friend who's building her real estate Instagram page told me the "10-to-1 Rule." For one minute of content, you'll need to shoot at least 10 minutes of video and edit it down. Efficiency improves as you get better with storyboarding.

3. Get the right equipment. At first, I was using my own cell phone (old Samsung) to make the content. This gave me a bunch of headaches (e.g., lost drafts, freezing/crashing during editing, video edits not saving). I invested in Google Pixel 7 as a dedicated content phone. I also got Bluetooth microphones, a ring light, and a couple different phone stands. Made a huge difference in making content efficiently.

4. For content ideas, I have my interns come up with 2 posts each during their 6-week rotation here. I also keep in mind what kind of questions I get a lot of, and I'll do videos on that (e.g., Freestyle Libre how-tos, etc.).

5. Stay away from stock photos and pre-made posts. Show pics of your team, your pharmacy, your boba runs, your team dinners, anything that's actually YOU. Create a library of graphics in Canva specific for your shop so you can easily modify or recycle for other content. For example, my interns made my logo in a bunch of different color combos for different holidays etc. so we can easily slap our logo on anything we need.

6. Have fun with your content! You WILL be in the spotlight so don't be shy There's a post of me doing a sinus rinse on camera. Yea kinda gross, but people loved it. (Eventually, took it down because of some trolling comments.) Don't be scared to try new things, don't worry if your post isn't perfect. Just have fun and be genuine, the audience will pick up on your positive vibes.