In one of the first large-scale studies of Facebook pages ever conducted, Toronto-based  Sysomos analyzed and investigated usage patterns in nearly 600,000.

The results include information on various aspects including popularity, amount of content posted, number of fans and categories. This is a study of interest if you manage Facebook Fan pages or plan to create one.

Here are a few highlights from the analysis:

• On average, a Facebook Page has 4,596 fans.

• Four percent of pages have more than 10,000 fans, 0.76% of pages have more than 100,000 fans, and 0.05% of pages (or 297 in total) have more than a million fans.

• Pages with more than one million fans have nearly three times as much owner-generated content as the average Facebook page. (Where “owner-generated content” means things like photos, videos, and links posted by the page’s administrators.)

• Pages with more than one million fans have nearly 60 times as much fan-generated content (photos, videos) as the average Facebook page.

• On an average Facebook Page, the administrators create one wall post every 15.7 days. Among pages with more than one million fans, one wall post is created for every 16.1 days. This suggests that wall post frequency does not correlate with a page’s popularity.

• Overall, the most popular “category” for Facebook pages is “non-profits”, while “celebrities”, “music”, and “products” are the most popular categories among pages with more than one million fans.

There is much more to this study and you can find it all here.

The point I’d like to make here is that major engagement on a Facebook fan page like any other community takes a lot of work and often times the administrator (community manager) is charged with creating the bulk of the content. Facebook may be biggest, baddest,  go-to-social network on the planet with it’s 350 million members, but don’t let that number fool you. They’re not knocking down doors to fan your page.

It still takes a lot of work to find success.