I recently saw Martin Atkins from Tour Smart speak at a conference and he was singing the praises of Hootsuite as a great tool for musicians who are using Twitter to market their music and keep in touch with their fans. Hootsuite not only allows you to do things like manage several different social network accounts at once (like Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, ping.fm) but it also allows you to schedule tweets. This is amazingly useful when your touring for example and you want to keep up a dialogue about where your appearing each night but are unsure about being able to find the time or signal connection to do so. What’s more, it’s free!

Other programs and websites are beginning to offer similar services, my program of choice Tweetdeck seems to have added scheduling into the latest release along with support for MySpace status updates etc. Whichever program you use though it’s worth spending some time thinking about ways to use tools like these to keep the conversation going with your fans, even when your busy doing other things.