On Nov 15, The Nat (San Diego) hosted a Twitter chat, 12-2PM our time. They are celebrating the opening of their new exhibit ‘Unshelved: Cool Stuff from Storage’, so they called the Twitter conversation #Unshelved, and invited museums to join in with rarely-seen objects in their own collections.
Since we have exactly that same type of exhibit open right now, I was able to promote our objects and our anniversary a lot. I also interacted with other museums over their objects. It took approximately three hours, including the follow up. But some posts are still being seen and shared.
The biggest hit was a single tweet about the fossil white shark in our 100 Years exhibit, which has over 41,000 impressions at the moment. Over 200 people ‘liked’ it and 87 people retweeted it. Our bat conversations were also popular, and our tuatara got some interest.
Crowd favorite #unshelved for our new exhibit: Great white shark fossil! The skull, teeth and some vertebrae were fossilized and discovered just like this, and donated to the Museum by Dr. Gordon Hubbell. #Sharks + #fossils = happy museum visitors!https://t.co/mkppwkI7Ex pic.twitter.com/jn9jlEWXSf
— Florida Museum (@FloridaMuseum) November 15, 2017
We interacted with The Nat, The Field, Cincinnati Museum Center, North Carolina MNS, Biodiversity Heritage Library, Cleveland MNH, Delaware MNH, and more. We also got retweeted by Kirk Johnson, Director at Smithsonian NMNH, and David Skelly, Director of the Yale Peabody MNH. (Be still, my museum geek heart! #happyflippers!)