Just how effective is it to make a Facebook page for your restaurant?
Here’s one example from the food service industry:

Dunkin’ Donuts launched a two-day Facebook event that allowed fans to weigh in on the national chain’s new line of healthy menu options, including bagels, lite specialty coffees, and healthy breakfast sandwiches.

The purpose was to engage customers, boost email signups for Dunkin’ Perks, which runs promos for local markets and reinforces national Dunkin’ Donuts messaging, and get feedback on new items. Dunkin’s Facebook page has well over 370,000 fans. They won’t reveal how many people are on the Perks email list, but it’s at least that many.

Those are some pretty impressive numbers. Does that mean sales are going to go up the minute you hit “publish” on your Facebook page? Well, maybe not, but the bottom line is that having a fan page definitely can’t hurt you, and may very well help. If you don’t start bringing in loads of new customers, you’ll at least improve retention among existing ones.

More importantly, a Facebook fan page can be a great way to collect information about your customers and get feedback about your restaurant. You can leverage this information to connect with customers in new ways and expand your email marketing campaigns. You’ll also have a direct line to customers, revealing what they don’t like about your establishment as well as what’s working well.

So how exactly do you create a great Facebook page?
And how do you start gaining fans and generating interest in your restaurant?
Some Facebook strategies:

Build a great fan page. As a business you’ll want to create a Facebook fan page rather than a profile. The bad thing about a fan page is that you can’t communicate with others the same way you’re used to. A fan page is much more reliant on people finding you and engaging you.

The good part about a fan page is that you can do a lot of customization. Find someone with some decent design and HTML skills and you’ll be able to make your fan page look different from anything else on Facebook. Create custom tabs, set up a couple RSS feeds, and you’ll be well on your way to making your fan page stand out for your customers.

There are countless step-by-step guides to building Facebook fan pages on the web. A quick Google search will return you more articles on the subject than you know what to do with. The most important thing is to get someone involved who knows their way around HTML. That skill is what is going to allow you to customize your page fully.

Tell everyone about your page. With a fan page you can’t just go around Facebook friending as many people as you can find like you can with a regular profile. Therefore you must drive traffic to your fan page in order to get some fans. The most obvious places to do this are on your website and in email marketing campaigns, but it would definitely benefit you to explore some other options, like business cards or even your menus.

Offer your fans something unique. Once you’ve started to build a fan base, reward them with some sort of promotion – a free appetizer, 2-for-1 drinks, anything to get your fans to actually come into the restaurant and spend money. The added benefit for you is that you’ll be able to gauge exactly how successful your fan page is based on how many people use the promo you only released through Facebook.