Starting a Facebook fan page is to a social media marketing strategy as pumpkin pie is to Thanksgiving.  In other words, it’s assumed and expected that it will be part of the plan.  Starting a page is easy, even I could do it, but becoming popular is not as easy as it looks.

In a report issued by Sysomos that analyzed 600,000 Facebook fan pages, it turns out 77 percent of fan pages have 1,000 fans or less – meaning there are a lot of fan pages out there attracting a fairly healthy following (1,000 fans is nothing to sneeze at), but you probably have to be an actor or Michael Jackson to get into the Millionaire’s Club.  In his blog “It’s Not Easy Being Popular.  77 Percent of Facebook Fan Pages have 1,000 Fans or Less,” Erick Schonfeld breaks it down for us.

The vast bulk of fan pages have between 10 and 1,000 fans.  Only 4 percent have more than 10,000 fans, and less than 1/20th of a percent have more than a million fans.  It breaks down as follows:

• 95% of pages have more than 10 fans
• 65% of pages have more than 100 fans
• 23% of pages have more than 1,000 fans
• 4% of pages have more than 10,000 fans
• 0.76% of pages have more than 100,000 fans
• 0.047% of pages have more than one million fans (297 in total).

The categories Facebook fan pages fall into are remarkably evenly distributed.  Celebrities, products, stores, restaurants, bars and clubs, websites, music, organizations, and non profits each make up between 6.9 percent and 7.5 percent of fan pages by category.

So-called celebrities only make up 7 percent of all fan pages.   Of course, there are also some real celebrities (both dead and alive) who attract massive followings to their Facebook fan pages. Okay, there’s only 297 of them.  For instance, Michael Jackson has the biggest fan page with 10.4 million fans, and that’s not counting the probably-overlapping 4.7 million who are fans of R.I.P. Michael Jackson (We Miss You). The action movie star Vin Diesel clocks in at 7 million fans, which is more than Barack Obama (6.9 million) or Megan Fox (5 million). Yes, people on Facebook are idiots (Megan Fox is much hotter than Vin Diesel). In contrast, the most popular person on Twitter, Ashton Kutcher, has 4 million followers, and Obama’s Twitter account only has 2.75 million—although that’s without even trying.

The biggest product page is Facebook’s own page, with 5.8 million fans (hey, is this rigged?), followed by Starbucks with 5.1 million (the page is filled with wall comments such as, “MMMMM Pumpkin Spice Latte!”).  Sysomos drilled down further, looked at the 297 pages with more than one million fans, and properly categorized them—or at least tried.  It turns out many of them (39.2 percent) are uncharacterizable such as “Nights Out With Friends.”  But the rest can be broken down into music (16.7 percent), celebrities 16.0 (percent), products (11.9 percent), TV shows (8.5 percent), films (3.4 percent), and games (1.4 percent).

And that’s just like it is in the real world. If you have more than a million fans, chances are you are either a rock star or an actor.

And unlike on Twitter, where popularity is correlated with how many times you Tweet, Facebook fan pages tend to be updated only once every 16 days.  And that’s really the big difference between Facebook fans and Twitter followers. On Twitter, you follow someone because you want to hear what they have to say. On Facebook, you fan them just to show your support of affinity.  Too often, it’s a throwaway gesture.  But then, fame is fleeting.