This is Part I in a two part series.

Update: Pete Warden posted on April 5, that Facebook threatened to sue him over Fan Page Analytics and he had no choice but to take the data down. He writes about the experience here.

Pete Warden’s Fan Page Analytics is an online application that generates comparison data & geographic demographics of Facebook Fan Pages. A lot of discussion around fan pages has been that they are low-visibility, elicit little engagement from fans and are akin to a status symbol- check this box so your friends will know, you too are a fan of sock monkeys.

Gist, a social CRM, hosted the dinner at Defrag ’09 where I met Pete Warden and a host of other technies interested in creating a clearer picture of social network users from publicly available data. Based on those conversations, Pete decided to tackle the Fan Page challenge.

A couple of days ago, just after a few tweeps were discussing that number of Fans doesn’t necessarily correlate with activity or community, Pete released Fan Page Analytics.  A common perception: Fan Pages basically offer the ability to demonstrate an affiliation. And, with the exception of a few celebrities and organizations that work to build community on the page, not a whole lot happens on a Fan Page.

As it turns out, even with little activity, Fan Pages can provide useful information when viewed through Fan Page Analytics (FPA). For example, Fans of Snuggie™ are also likely to be fans of freeze pops, Michael Jackson and Twilight (Sorry, but I couldn’t resist picking a “soft” target for my first example.)

Yesterday I asked Pete a few questions to learn more about FPA.

What inspired you to create FPA?

I’ve spent a lot of time designing ads to run on Facebook for my Mailana service, and it was very tough to figure out what locations or shared interests to target since Facebook doesn’t give you access to that sort of demographic information.

Where did you find the data?

I realized that the data I’d already collected from web crawls of public profiles on facebook.com could help me build a better picture of the audience I should be aiming for.

One happy user is Markus Neuert at CycleFilm

I asked Markus what he’d learned from using Fan Page Analytics:

At first, I was very surprised by the amount of fans I share with Women’s and Ladies Cycling Mags. On second thought, I wasn’t. Through my own Fan Page analytics provided by Facebook, I knew my audience is 80% male – and males like to look at females – so what better way to do that than on the mentioned women’s cycling Fan Pages.   My recent DVD release of US Pro Cyclist Liz Hatch may also have contributed to that.  Either way, the analysis clearly confirmed Facebook’s own analysis data, and even expanded upon it by giving me concrete options to act upon.

Pete Warden’s Fan Page Analytics is currently in beta. If you’d like to participate here is a link to the form.

And the saga continues…Part II: Pete shares where he is going with FPA and Markus explains how he immediately leveraged his FPA data for CycleFilm.