The question you should be asking is, why do you want Facebook fans?

Is it to retarget visitors to your site through Facebook ads? In that case, a Like button on your site would work well.

Is it because your app has a viral element that requires appearance on profiles/News Feed to grow? Then you should be incentivizing users to friend you by offering them something of high perceived value in return.

Or do you simply want a high number of fans as a growth metric to show off? For that, there are numerous enterprises online that will sell you as many fans as you want at a reasonable price.

That's a hard question to answer without providing some information on your product/service. Il raises a good question in his post, 'why do you want Facebook fans?.' That answer will help determine how you want to gather those FB fans, because there are a lot of ways to do so and some are not so legit.

But, my short answer would be to leverage your existing product/service to convert your active community into FB fans. Those will most likely be your most engaging FB fan audience and easiest to become fans with the right incentive. From there, your networks of fans will only start to grow.

Sorry I couldn't give you a specific answer, but without knowing your business I couldn't provide a suggestion. In my own community, we encourage the players of our games to become facebook fans through virtual currency, bragging rights, and other incentives.

How often do you send updates to your fans?

We update our fans through multiple mediums. Our community posts about us to their walls and news stream, but we hardly contact our players through facebook directly. We communicate with them through our FB fan page, provide coupons, competitions, and other marketing strategies.

Hi flignates,

I just released a website to manage updates to your fan pages. Would you check it out and tell me what you think?

http://www.statusscheduler.com

I would like to know if Facebook fanpages are useful for marketing. If you use a Facebook fanpage, does it drive new users to your website?

I think facebook fan pages are useful in re-engaging users. I equate it to an email list. You can gather fans like you gather emails for your email list. When you push a message to your fans it is similar to pushing an email to your email lists. Both don't drive more users to your site unless the user chooses to share the email or the status message.