Can't Tag From My Fan Page

i'd like to do 'shout outs' to fav pages from my business profile but can only seem to do this from my personal profile... strange, it worked yesterday!

Who are you trying to tag? Is it in a status or comment?

in a status

trying to tag from my 'like' list in a status - no drop down menu appears at all after the @

That's because you can't tag your fans in statuses, you can only tag events, friends and pages of your personal account.

so that means that I can't promote other businesses from my business page?

Cool, yep, it seems you can do it now. If you are logged into your profile, then you switch to be logged in as a page (via the “Account – Use facebook as a page”) but INSTEAD of clicking on “Switch” next to the page, you just click on the page. Then when you are updating your status on the page, you can do the @mention thing on anyone you are personally connected to.
If, however, you click on “Use Facebook as page” and then click on Switch, it won’t work, and the @mention only brings up people connected to the page.
That is so cool, I like the new facebook pages

Somehow didn't think of that. Great idea! That's because the mention feature indexes the database of your account... and fans are stored in your page's.

Gladly solved.