Being Present With Your Network

If you are scheduling posts, its difficult to
have a meaningful conversation.

This year has marked substantial change in how I interact within my networks. My focus has shifted much more to conversation and less upon sharing items unsolicited. It seems that stats drive a lot of interactions on Twitter which creates an 'over sharing effect'. While many of the articles and Tweets are worthwhile most don't contain enough information on why I should read them.
Earlier this year I read a blog post written by social media expert +Peg Fitzpatrick titled "What is link litter and how to avoid it". I can honestly say that this one post changed how I interact on my social networks forever. Before reading her post, I fastidiously loaded up my +Buffer queue each night with articles that I thought would be of interest to my network. I would always give credit to the author (an extra time consuming step often overlooked by others) and the tweets would be send out while I was away from the computer during the day. One thing that I didn't get, however, was the low numbers of clicks those articles got. Peggy's article hit home the point that I wasn't giving my network a good enough reason to click on those links. I was also missing the whole idea of my network, which is to interact! Even if someone found one of those links interesting and wanted to talk about it I wasn't there to discuss thus ending the effectively ending the conversation.

When To Use Post Scheduling 

I hardly ever schedule posts any more Tweets because I'm focused more on the interactions than pushing out information. When I do schedule a post I make sure that I give my reader enough information so that they can see the relevance of what I've shared. I do still use the scheduling feature of +HootSuite when I'm doing a presentation and I want my audience to have access to certain links or articles at certain times in the presentation. I also schedule post when I'm in a Twitter chat and want to RT an interesting post. Often times I find that the same tweet gets RT'd a bunch of times and add noise to the chat. I like to still RT it, but later when it can stand out on its own. Do you use scheduling in your social media stream? If so I'm very interested in your ideas and ways you utilize this tool. And don't worry, I'll be right here to discuss.