Congrats. You're one of the relatively small number of venue owners who realizes that there's more to your Facebook presence than just a billboard and a menu. You can, in fact, incentivize people to visit your place and check in (which shows all their friends that they're at your cafe, helping spread the word too) for relatively little cost. Even better, when you create a deal for a Facebook Places venue, you are rewarding the subset of people who actually come to your place. Smart.

Having said that, there are a number of restaurants and other businesses that are learning the importance of understanding all the numbers before they jump into a geolocation deal like Groupon or LivingSocial. Those are more expensive because the networks take a cut (Groupon takes 50%, LivingSocial 20-30%) but even without it, the first thing I'll encourage you to do is think through the cost of your deal versus

That's why Facebook seems like an interesting alternative, as you'll see in a second.

To start out, go to your Facebook Places venue page and click on "Edit Page". Now on the left side of the page you'll see quite a few different options:

The one we want is "Deals" near the bottom. Click on it and you'll see the little info graphic for Facebook Checkin Deals:

Click on "Create a Check-In Deal for this Page" and you'll see that there are four basic types of check-ins available:

Since you're not a charity, you can't use the last one to garner donations but any of the other three are worthwhile choices. The best option depends on what behavior your want to incentivize. If you want to encourage people to come in with their friends (e.g., more groups) then a Friend Deal can be great: when two or more people check in at the same time, they each get a deal you've specified.

If you want to get new customers to visit, then an Individual Deal is probably your best bet as it rewards everyone who comes in and, don't worry, you can put a cap on the total number of deals you make available.

Finally, Loyalty Deals are basically digital loyalty cards. You can set them up so that every fifth checkin produces a coupon for a free dessert or free muffin with the purchase of a cup of coffee, for example.

Let's go a bit further with an Individual Deal and see what's revealed:

Note that if you're going to have any of these check-in deals involve showing their printout or mobile screen to your salesperson or cashier, you're going to have to train your staff to recognize and properly deal with the digital coupon. I have gone into places with Foursquare discounts just to have the cashier be completely stymied and half the management team in the store show up to figure out how to process it correctly. Makes the store look a bit loosely managed in my opinion.

It's the last portion that lets you really specify the parameters of your Facebook Check-In Deal:

As you can see, you can set a starting and end date, specify a maximum number of redemptions (which I suggest is a must so that you can calculate the costs associated with your campaign) and indicate how often someone can use the deal (e.g., once per day or once per user). Know and thoughtfully set your parameters and remember that if you're too strict you can always do another campaign that's a bit loser, but if you're too lose, you could lose money on the promotion or really upset your customers in the process.

From this point, all you need to is click on the "Create" button at the bottom of the page and the deal is created and live. Now the hard part, letting your customers know. But for that I'll leave it to your own creativity!