Can anyone give me their thoughts on how to use social media to bring attention to your station, but without necessarily advertising to the point the FCC notices? I know there are wild cards like ham radio operators in your area, especially if you're using, say, Facebook, and you're using hashtags to make your page noticeable by the locals you're targeting, but there has to be a happy medium.
The only thing I can suggest if using something like Facebook is to make the group invite only with a basic public description (to allow listeners to search you out once you tell them what group name to look for) or private and review each person before allowing them to join. Eventually your original listener base that are closest to you will bring in their friends that are trustworthy too and so on, just keep an eye on how fast the fan base expands and who.
There simply is no security when using social media in that way to get the word out unless you have someone else moderate it for you that you trust and make sure the only information about your stations frequency and schedule is left with those in trust that can't be traced back to you the owner of said location.
Personally I am a fan of letting them come to us station owners. Run the station and hint at social media gathering spots, see who bites and if they are legit fans let them in. I have my doubts the FCC really would go as far as digging for those sort of pages anyway and if so once they find out it's not even ran by the owner but by a fan or friend that refuses to divulge information they probably won't dig too much more into it as long as your friends are closed lip.
Always have a means to close down quickly if things go bad both on the web end and your station if you somehow get on the wrong peoples radar, but of course the latter is always a goal in the first place with pirate radio ops, so play your cards right and make sure to not ruffle the wrong feathers and keep the stations ego in check. Fame is fun and all but consider what risk that can bring if the wrong people want to take you out from cutting into their profit and listeners.
Remember this should remain a hobby or somewhat obscure operation like running a good underground party or such. If you want to take pirate radio to the next level I hate to be the bearer of bland opinion but you might want to look into commercial legal endeavors or sending prerecorded shows out to other pirates/legal stations willing to take the risk to broadcast you.
BTW welcome to the forum! Always nice to see new people around