A University of Toledo social media post brought plenty of attention to the school, but in the end, it might have been too much.

According to a tweet posted to the @UToledo account Tuesday morning, if it reached 500,000 retweets, the university would change its mascot from Rocky to Shrek.

And while that number seemed unreasonable at first, Twitter users were up to the challenge — by the time the tweet disappeared, there were more than 90,000 retweets. Later in the afternoon, the university deleted the tweet.

“The tweet was meant to be fun, but it caused too much of a distraction,” Christine Billau, media relations specialist at UT, said in an email.

At its height, the tweet was receiving roughly 1,000 new retweets every two minutes. In an earlier email, Billau said, “If you scroll through the account, you’ll see our social media team regularly has a lot of fun to engage and joke with our students. ... We constantly engage our students with memes and jokes on Twitter to create a community with our followers and draw attention to the University.”

Billau also said if the tweet reached it’s goal, they would plan something special for Rocky, like dressing him up as Shrek.

Contact Jeremy Schneider at jschneider@theblade.com, 419-724-6082, or on Twitter @j1schneider.

First Published April 24, 2018, 5:23 p.m.