title: Fan count for a Facebook Fan Page
body: <p>I needed to pull the fan count for particular fan pages on Facebook.  After digging through the API, I couldn't find a way to do this with the API "proper."  Instead I fell back to a FQL query, and it worked quite well.</p>
  
  <pre><code>select fan_count from page where page_id = &lt;FAN_PAGE_ID&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>What did I miss about the Facebook API.  Is this the only way to capture a fan count for a page?  In general, how often do you use FQL for your requests as opposed to the exposed API methods?</p>