Public beta: Attracting users?

Question

It seems that we are now in public beta, so it is time to start thinking about how we can attract other physicists to the site. Any ideas on how best to do this? In my view, at least, it is important that we do our best to maximise the number of professional physicists, academics and graduate students, as they really form the target audience for the site.

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Comments

For a comparison, MO early users were mostly UC Berkeley graduate students, people in the subfield of the founder, or readers of a specific blog.

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Many new users have entered since the site became public, but by far most of them seem to be mathematicians rather than physicists. I just noticed that mathoverflow has this banner at the top: "Like theoretical physics? Check out theoreticalphysics.stackexchange.com.".

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@Heidar: It's been [done](http://meta.mathoverflow.net/discussion/1161/theoretical-physics-stack-exchange-just-went-live/#Item_0) by [Scott Morrison](http://mathoverflow.net/users/3/scott-morrison) and [Anton Geraschenko](http://mathoverflow.net/users/1/anton-geraschenko). I think that is rather helpful than harmful - folks from MO are familiar with the SE system and are most likely to keep their questions here relevant to physics since they already have their place for pure maths. So thanks to Scott and Anton!

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I agree that it is a very kind thing they are doing for us.

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@TobiasKienzler Yeah I definitely agree, Its only an advantage that the number of researchers increase.

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Answer 1

I guess there is no magic:

• post the link (with an appropriate description) on Facebook, Twitter or Google+ today (it is only a few minutes),
• if you are running a science-oriented blog, write a post on TP.SE,
• if there is a mailing list at your faculty/institute of theoretical physics - send an e-mail.

And, of course, don't forget to talk in person about TP.SE. It is usually much more effective than just sending messages.

One more thing that may be worth consideration is preparing a pdf notice about TP.SE to print and put on cork tables at faculties.

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Comments

Here a public FB event about the beta, you could join and then share with your friends http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=156696187758595

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I think these suggestions can be very useful for Physics Overflow too : ) 

I'm not so sure as to whether the first one will help, but it's worth trying. 

Answer 2

Somehow this never occurred to me until now, but if someone would like to make a post on meta.physics.SE about the public beta, I'd be happy to set it as featured for a while. (Though I imagine most of the target audience for such a post is already here...)

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Comments

Post [here](http://meta.physics.stackexchange.com/q/922/66)

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