Facebook: Are your friends trusted sources or naggy noisemakers?

Getty ImagesPeople have been worrying for a long time about mixing business and pleasure on Facebook. Much of the conversation centers around how much of their personal lives people want to reveal to colleagues and bosses. But lately I've been interested in the flip side of this. How and how much should people talk about their businesses, their work, or their causes on Facebook or other social networking sites?

The answer depends on how interesting your work, your business and your causes are to your friends. If what you post is interesting or useful, your friends will view you as a trusted source, someone they turn to for inside information, much like a personal news service. But if it's all self-promotional blather, your friends will vote with their mice by either silencing you (using the handy Facebook "hide" feature), or worse, hitting the "unfriend" button on the bottom left of the page.

It's one thing to see friends promoting their own interests, but now companies are paying people with large social networks to tout their brands on Twitter.

One of the reasons I hang out on Facebook and Twitter is to learn about the cool things my friends post about their work. And if a friend has a business, I expect to see occasional news or plugs for the business as well. The key is the occasional part, unless it's a business I want or need information about on a regular basis, like Van Leeuwen, an artisan ice cream truck that posts its whereabouts on its Twitter page. If the friend is posting only posts relating to a business or cause, then it's probably time to start a fan page. But when my friends start renting themselves out to corporate sponsors, that's when I'll be rushing right to the unfriend button.

What's your take? Do you like learning about your friends businesses, causes, and working lives online or do you find that you're tuning out more than listening? And what's your view about people tweeting for hire?