Happy Birthday! 4 Years? OMG

birthday-beaver Today marks 4 years that our little site has been chugging away. It seems like it was just yesterday that I started this and it’s amazing at how much it’s grown. What started as just a place to post funny stuff I found while surfing the net has started to roll into this great community of incredible fans and for that, I’m truly thankful. There have been some ups and downs over the years but all in all it’s been a lot of fun and something love. Mostly due to you, the fans. Thank you for being a part of this and for laughing along with us.

I wanted to take a few moments to highlight some of the things that are going on here at Beaver Central and announce some of the cool things we’re doing moving forward.


Social Media
The facebook fan page has always been a great place for our fans but facebook itself is having some major problems. If you haven’t heard, facebook has been changing it’s algorithm so fan pages don’t show on your news feed as much as before and in order to be seen they’ve enacted a pay to post system. In a nutshell, we used to be able to post a funny picture and thousands of our fans would see it. Now, if we post a picture maybe a couple hundred will see it if we’re lucky. Facebook will let us reach all of our fans if we pay them and quite frankly, dropping $100 to reach all of our fans every time we post something isn’t something we can really do. This is a sore topic for not just us but many page owners on facebook and has really led to a decline in the content sharing of their platform. So we’re still holding out waiting for facebook to pull their heads out of certain orifices but in the mean time it’s motivated us to expand the social reach.

twitter iconA Strange Beaver twitter account was registered a a few years back but since some squatter beat us to the name long before we ever started this site, we’ve had to settle for @StrangeBeaver1. If you’re into tweets, make sure you follow us. It’s only recently been resurrected but we’re having a lot of fun with it. The content on there is a bit different from our main page. Sure there are occasional links to our posts, but also a lot more personal stuff and behind the scenes type of interactions. Plus retweets from some of our friends to view even more neat content.

Pinterest_FaviconWe’re on Pinterest too! We have a small following on our Pinterest page but it’s really starting to grow. At first I was reluctant to start yet another social account but this one is kind of fun. It’s highlights from some of our articles and from a ‘I want more pictures’ perspective it’s cool. You’ll also find a lot of other things that never made it to the front page of our site. So if you’re a pinner, follow the boards.

I’m still reluctant to go full speed with the Youtube channel given the problems we’ve had with them in the past. But we’ve been kind of testing it out again over the past couple of weeks and we may put more focus on growing the partnership.

Announcement
Welcome the newest member of our family!
4u2lol.com For a while now we’ve been finding really cool pictures and things that don’t seem to fit on Strange Beaver. We didn’t really like the idea of single image posts since full galleries are better, but still wanted a way to share those findings with our fans. Well we’ve dusted off an old project domain and decided to make it live, today actually. Welcome our new sister site 4u2LOL.com! You may notice it has a similar feel than Strange Beaver, but there are a few differences. The site is geared more toward humor and the posts will be shorter but there will be more of them. The site will also allow more user generated content so when you find those cool pictures that you want to share, you’ll be able to upload them right to the site. We’re also testing out a brand new commenting platform from Solid Opinion. It allows users to upvote/downvote comments, leave replies, and even has a points based system to give you rewards. We’re testing it out on 4u2LOL and if it seems popular we’ll be implementing it to Strange Beaver. So if you get a chance, check out the site and let us know what you think. Just remember it’s still new so the content needs some time to grow. Bookmark it for later and keep an eye on it.

 

Intern Steph
Unfortunately Steph’s internship finished up last month. Steph deserves some credit because she was the first intern to actually finish the program. Most of them quit after a week or two, so yay Steph! Now don’t get sad, since she loved you guys so much and enjoys goofing off, she’s decided to stay on and be a full time Beaver! So now you’ll be seeing a lot more of her, we just need to come up with a better name since she’s no longer an intern. How about ‘Steph the Geek’? Although she’d probably prefer ‘Steph who isn’t paid enough to put up with this’…

 

BeaverMart
Our main supplier for t-shirts has sadly closed up shop. Don’t worry though, we still have Beaver shirts available, kind of. We found a different supplier but they are a bit limited in their offerings. For right now shirts like the ‘Eat Mor Beaver’ and classic logo shirts are currently only available in white until we find a different vendor. To make it up to everyone, the Basic Beaver shirts have all been marked down to just $10. Those we can still get in a variety of colors and we are even working on adding more colors. Honestly, the Basic Beaver shirts have been more popular over the past year so it makes sense to mark those down anyway. Also, to celebrate our birthday, the popular Strange Beaver 3″ stickers have all been marked down to just $1. BeaverMart has been a great addition to our site. Not only are we seeing happy fans wanting Beaver gear, but the proceeds from BeaverMart help us fund Team Beaver and help out with some of the charity work we do.

 

Media partners
We continue to work with different media companies who want us to publish content for them. Over the past year there has been some great growth in the videos we’ve shown on our site from incredibly talented producers. We’re continuing that and hopefully will have some more big announcements coming soon.

 

Those are some of the main highlights for now. There’s a ton of other great things in the pipe right now and some exciting new features and additions will be coming soon. Make sure you keep an eye out.

 

Thank you for 4 great years Beavers, here’s to many more!
Scott

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