We have a detailed article on using Facebook Pages to promote restaurants. Hopefully it will see the light of day in a publication soon. How did we come to write this article?
Well, Agile' has two restaurants as clients, and we set up and maintain their Facebook pages (along with maintaining their web sites). As a result of that, we picked up a restaurant review site, CNYDining.com, as a client a few years back. It languished for some time, but recently we renewed it's lease on life.
Friday night, we used FB's "Promotion" utility to get the name of the site out there. Technically, what we were hunting for was "Likes" on the CNYDining Facebook Page. As a by-product, we were hoping people would travel through to the actual web site. We did this with the smallest of budgets – $5 per day.
Results: In less than 48 hours, we were well over 50 likes for the page, and the statistics for the main site show a steady increase in the number of visitors, which confirms that they've been coming through from the FB Page. Miniscule numbers, right? We also launched a Twitter account for them, and the first tweet just went live around midnight.
Our next step is to put together a give-away keyed to FB Page "Likes." We're looking at a couple 2-for-1 dining coupon books. Total cost (with shipping to the winners) should be around $50. I'm planning to reach 250 likes that way. And to get more, we'll do what I've been advocating all my clients do: ASK. Ask them to suggest the site and the Page to their friends.