As Facebook continues to grow, now over 350 million users worldwide, more and more B2B companies are setting up Facebook Fan Pages. These pages give a business a home on Facebook and allows their content to be shared with their fans, in the same information stream with updates and links from their friends. Studies have shown that many people follow brands on Twitter looking for special deals, but Facebook is different. People become fans of companies and brands on Facebook for two different reasons. The first is that they want to keep up with the company and learn more about them. The second is they want to associate themselves with the company. That is they want to express their love of the company with others. The origin of the word fan, after all, is fanatic.

The brands, Land O’Frost and Sara Lee Deli, both sell lunch meats, cold cuts and other sliced-meat products. Coincidentally, they are both introducing campaigns that are centered on the social media.

HubSpot recently surveyed 231 B2B marketers and asked exactly that question. The results, released this week in the 2010 State of Inbound Marketing Report, are summarized in the word cloud below.

E-mail best practices dictate that you get the best results when you send messages to those who have opted in. But the recession, said Gary Halliwell, CEO of NetProspex, a “crowdsourcing” marketing database company, has changed e-mail marketing.