Minnows under a float work very well under most water conditions for Erie sthd. Correct shotting pattern is very important with minnows or any other bait.  Use the smallest shot you can, Blackbird is a good choice.  I use gremlin size B round earless shot because I have a hard time seeing, adding the smaller blackbird shot to my leader especially with
cold hands.
 
I now fly fish 95% of the time, am no longer intrested in just fishing for sheer numbers of fish.  I can fish every day from Sept thru Dec, all the Erie sthd tribs are within an hrs drive of my house.  If your time on the tribs is limited, you'd do well to float fish with quality bait. 
 
Minnows are a quality bait but live, a royal pain in the****to carry around.  My favorite baits are:  1. raw bags, preferably brown trout                                             
               2. raw sthd skein
               3.  home made pin/bead head jig, about 1/64 oz tipped with wax worms
               4.  red worms or half of a crawler
Worms are a very good sthd bait, over looked by many fishermen and often take fish when nothing else seems to work.
 
Hope this helps, guess the point I'm trying to make is, minnows are a good bait but not worth the hassle of carrying around,  Spawn, jigs, wax worms, garden worms are really all you need to consistently catch sthd under most, if not all water conditions.
 
                                            

ORIGINAL: joebaker79

Leave the minnow bucket at home. Use the right jigs and use them properly and you'll have more fish inhaling them then you could ever have on a minnow. One of the few times a live minnow cannot duplicate the action of a lure designed after its likeness. The right jig will not only have you catching 40 fish when everyone else is catching 40 fish, but it will have you catching 30 fish when everyone else is catching 3. Then your jig box becomes worth more than every bucket of minnows on every creek in Erie.

To answer your question, when I did fish minnows shot didn't matter much unless you are fishing a deeper hole...dont want the minnow swimming in the top foot of water when fish are holding 4-5. Sometimes no shot is required at all for minnows. Sometimes no float. Single eggs and flies however depth becomes your friend, so controlling it exactly will keep you in fish. If you can change the depth with a float and shot buy mere inches, you're going to be hooking up all day.

 
I agree 100%  you wont beat a good jig fisherman on the tribs no matter how hard you try because they can catch them when there hitting everything but more importantly they can catch them just the same when they wont take something drifted.  There is no greater feeling then walking into manchester on a saterday afternoon after the fish have been "drifted" to death and start banging them