it is only with the advent of Internet radio you would be able to count listener numbers accurately (for a small FM station or a pirate you were reliant on feedback via telephone calls or pager/SMS messages). unlike analogue radio equipment where frequency bands are internationally agreed (broadcasters in one range, communications of ships/aircraft on another) and you can scan through the frequencies and will eventually find something to listen to, the URL for an internet radio could be anywhere and in any format.
Although much is said about mobile apps, a lot of these try and lock you into one station, gather too much personal data (presumably with the intention of monetising it by selling ads, but curiously many don't even use that data for sensible purposes like selecting stations nearest to your location), others are badly coded and use too much resources to run reliably on a smaller mobile device.
I recently conducted an experiment to see if it was as easy to listen to an online stream playing EDM as the pirate station I was on in 1990 (then using a small Japanese transistor radio) with a second hand Android device (given to me by a lad at my work as he had got a more powerful one). one very popular app radio app crashed the device to such extent I had to reinstall the whole firmware image of the damn thing, which was a pain to do. I tried this whilst cycling to work, the stream cut out as soon as I got into a less affluent area of the town and only returned in the rural space between the town and the village I work in, and I had to be very careful not to crash my bicycle as the music cuts in and out suddenly. I certainly wouldn't advise trying to do this in a car.
if you expect listeners to try and interact with your station on the same device they are listening to it on, if it is not a full size powerful computer (and sometimes even if it is), there is a good chance that doing so will knacker the audio from your stream, or the social app often delivers its own "enhanced audio/video content" (i.e some ads)) which competes with your content by cutting straight across it.
you mention broadcasting to a local area, and that some shows are presented by students. Therefore create an easy to use webpage, the Dutch pirates for instance provide a simple grid which contains links to the stations streams in various formats, the band II frequency and SMS number, and a link to a mobile app (which even some of them find hard to use and they are very smart folk indeed), if possible obtain a domain that is easy to remember.
If permitted, put up fliers in communal areas where the students gather or halls of residence with info about the station. befriend those students who are interested in computers, electronics and music, and can help others with such things as installing audio players, connecting a laptop or PC to a better hi fi system which may seem trivial to us but can be a source of great confusion and worry to others. if there is a significant age difference between you and the students, be careful not to run foul of youth safeguarding procedures (these vary from country to country) - although "going through the correct channels" could mean you also gain the teachers as listeners!
for all stations online listener stats are never 100% accurate because of how the Internet works. Some single connections could be from equipment serving 10 listeners, but the same statistics could show up from a single listener who has a dodgy internet connection that has disconnected them 10 times.
The output of your station via a single player could equally be being listened to on large loudspeakers in a big communal room of people, or just a cat (as the human who started the player has been drinking beer and consuming all sorts else and has fallen asleep, as has the dog).
this is also why providing telephone numbers, text lines and email addresses (and replying to these!) remains a good idea (they can also be used by a listener to alert you to problems with connection, in the same way listeners report interference or other problems on a analogue station. if you get a voicemail with just meowing, it possibly is a cat, as from some of the youtube videos I've seen sooner or later one will actually work out how to redial a number on a smartphone :rofl:
