Inside Facebook

Quick serve restaurants are continuing to grow in popularity on Facebook. Last week, Chich-fil-A became the first restaurant chain to hit 1 million Facebook fans, but hot on its heels is Pizza Hut, who just crossed the 1 million fan mark.

A generic Pizza page is one of the most popular generic food Pages on Facebook with more than 4.5 million fans, but Pizza Hut is the first pizzeria to move past 1 million itself. The next closest pizza joint is Papa John’s with a little over 300,000 fans.

The Pizza Hut Fan page offers several nice features. First, there’s a Facebook application for ordering from your local Pizza Hut restaurant. The app requires you to create a Pizza Hut account, but once you do, you don’t have to leave your Facebook page to order, and the process is much quicker since all of your info is already on file.

Second, the company is also heavily promoting its Pizza Hut iPhone app, which allows users to place orders from their iPhone. Many other restaurants offer an iPhone app to make ordering easy, but Pizza Hut is cross-promoting the it well, making the tab the default landing page.

Pizza Hut has done a good job of paying attention to the way Facebook users interact with other sites. While they offer discounts and promotions in their update stream, they do so lightly. Instead, the company is focusing first on building and promoting its e-commerce functionality to drive more pizza sales.