Yesterday, we offered 8 best practices for how restaurants can make use of Facebook pages. Here’s a look at the 15 restaurants and fast food chains with the most fans on Facebook. What’s most obvious is that fan bases are not directly tied to the overall size or type of restaurant. McDonald’s may be on top, but regional burger chain Chik-fil-A is second — and Burger King does not even have an official Facebook page.

Certainly, many of the brands on the list have promoted their pages through multimedia campaigns. But the takeaway for any restaurant, including local ones, is that Facebook pages are not based entirely on massive marketing budgets. It’s about how you can use a page to attract fans then convert them for your own marketing goals.

Also, we don’t have a way to measure how active fans are on a given page. So a smaller page may have many more users commenting, liking and otherwise engaging, while a larger one may be far less active.

Rank	Name	Fans

Notes on methodology: There’s currently no way to easily collect every single restaurant and fast food company with a page on Facebook. We publish PageData, which tracks all of the data that Facebook makes available, and according to the categories of page that Facebook has grouped pages under. However, some companies’ pages are categorized as “Food and Beverage” while others’ are “Restaurants.” In both categories, there are also a smattering of other brands that make food but do not have restaurants. Some, like TGI Friday’s, are not categorized in Facebook’s directory so we’ve included the numbers directly from the Facebook page. There’s also the real-world complexity of brands that are both restaurants of sorts as well as brands you see in supermarkets, such as Ben & Jerry’s. If you spot other brands we’re missing, please let us know and we’ll update. And, finally, we’re only looking at pages with “vanity URLs,” as this indicates that Facebook has specifically verified that the page owner is actually the brand and not an imposter.