MORE THAN JUST MARKETING: SOCIAL MEDIA AS AN EXHIBIT DEVELOPMENT TOOL

Many museums make extensive use of Twitter, Facebook, and other social media as a general outreach and education tool and as a marketing tool to promote museum exhibits, programs, and activities. The Western Science Center (WSC) in Hemet, California is a small natural history museum that, through mid-2014, had a limited social media presence that consisted mainly of occasional Facebook photo summaries of events that had already taken place. In late 2014 WSC began developing a more focused social media strategy, including promotion of future events on Facebook and Twitter, and the initiation of a blog focusing on scientific interpretation of fossils in the WSC collections. Based on informal observations that each platform was generally reaching a different audience, the blog quickly evolved to focus on Friday posts to take advantage of the #FossilFriday hashtag on Twitter, with cross-posting of content across all three platforms.

During planning to fill a gap in the exhibit schedule, WSC staff noticed a large percentage of the #FossilFriday posts concerned either pathological or ontogenetically significant specimens from the WSC collections. These posts already included explanatory text written for the general public, and in some cases interpretive sketches. This meant a significant portion of the design work for a new exhibit had already been completed, so the decision was made to launch the “Stories from Bones” exhibit based around the specimens described in the #FossilFriday posts. Once that decision was made, new #FossilFriday specimens were selected with the exhibit in mind, and the posts began to adopt a second function, of promoting the upcoming exhibit. The melding of online outreach and marketing efforts with exhibit planning allowed the exhibit to be designed and constructed only eight months after initial conception.