How should we attract new users in 2017?

Question

We have a lot to do in this re-vamping of CogSci.SE. However, after the site has a new scope, name and close vote, we still need people to come here. Therefore, it is necessary to actively approach, attract and engage people. Some individual attempts have been made (e.g. Google+, Facebook, Facebook a second time), but nothing seems to be very successful or carried out by many users (at the moment I am posting, liking and sharing the facebook posts on my own and get a whopping 30 people who see the post (which is very little)).

So, I would like to ask. How can we best market CogSci and how will we actually do it?

An overview of this discussion so far from community review, specifically targeting experts:

How do we attract and retain experts which are capable of answering questions, not just asking them?

• Get listed on professional sites: e.g., psychology.org.
• Attract psychology bloggers and research groups: e.g., a list of blogs is available here. Ask them to do a review of our site.
• Post links to quality posts on other sites: e.g., some subreddits, quora, Facebook, Google+, Twitter, academic mailing lists, LinkedIn, face-to-face. A full list of these can be collected in this post. How to encourage our users in sharing links? We need to make sure to stay respectful while doing so! This is a historically effective strategy.
• Top posts can be cited from Wikipedia, although this might only work in rare cases.
• Promotion on academic conferences, or even making SE an integral part of a conference. There is a budget for this.
• Promotion in universities, e.g., through awards, but of course, only if we in fact want to attract students.
• Attracting more regular users might just be a matter of time.
• Up vote posts that show research effort, down vote bad posts. Which ones are 'bad' will depend on expected question expertise. Extra efforts to introduce experts to the site (they might not be familiar to the format) are recommended.
• Top questions can be shared through the official Stack Exchange social network profiles.
• Do experts even have time for a site like this?
• Seed the site with popular scientific topics which can attract experts.
• We need to keep an eye on other Area 51 proposals to redirect them to CogSci if overlap exists. For example, a new neuroscience proposal got closed which comprised many experts, we should be welcoming to them.

Answer 1

Speaking from personal experience, I just stumbled on this site by chance when researching for my university course I am undertaking and found that reading some of the questions interested me and taught me some things ahead of where I was in the course.

Plus, I was finding that there are questions in areas which I had recently been studying for my course so I was able to answer them whilst enhancing my learning.

As @User1196 pointed out in Do experts even have time for a site like this?

cogsci.SE could be great for students of psychology, cognitive sciences and neighboring fields. We might consider promoting our site among this group.

I personally think the idea of promoting to those studying within the field would be a good start. That way collaborated learning within the field will drive the group to be more active.

Plus, seeding the site with popular subject areas (particularly with question titles using popular key words) will drive more visitors through Google searches, which could also increase our member numbers. After-all, this is how I got to know about the site myself.