Ever since I discovered there were applications you could use to schedule tweets I’ve been a big believer that this is a great way to promote content.

Scott Stratten, possibly better known at @unmarketing, disagrees. Disagrees in a big way too - he doesn’t think you should ever schedule tweets. And Scott knows a lot about social media. I’ve read his book and I respect him and his ideas so when he kept saying “scheduling tweets is bad” I started to think about it a lot more.

The more I thought about it, the more he convinced me to a certain degree, and the more I disagreed to another.

Since hearing him make his point (which is that Twitter is like networking and you wouldn’t send a flyer or a preprogrammed recording of your voice to a networking event) I’ve started changing my practices.

Whereas before I happily scheduled about five tweets throughout the day on a subject (perhaps a new blog post) I now rarely schedule more than 2-3 tweets in a day, usually no more than 2 on the same subject. The rest of the time I rely on being on twitter to pass along my message.

I’ve done this to decrease the chances of seeming like I’m spamming people or misleading people into thinking I’m online when I’m not. But that being said, I really believe that although twitter is about networking and engaging, people expect a certain amount of plain out information sharing. I think that I can remind readers once a week by scheduled tweet that I have a facebook page or a newsletter I would love for them to know about. I think that I can schedule a couple of tweets for times I won’t be online to hit more of my audience about a new blog post I hope they will be interested in reading.

But what do you think? Do you schedule tweets? How often? Does it bother you to see tweets repeated?