There are tons of services out there aimed at helping you time tweets for when your followers are most likely to be online and, as a result, most likely to interact with your message, either by clicking on a link, retweeting or responding.

The best I have seen is also the most expensive. For about $100 a month, SocialFlow will not only time your tweets to when your users are online, but when they also appear to be active on Twitter and talking about whatever it is you’re tweeting about. When I wrote about them for ReadWriteWeb in February, just after their launch, they were boasting click-through rate improvements of up to 60%.

That’s great if you have the budget, but most of us don’t. Unfortunately, most of us don’t have that kind of budget and have, until recently, had to rely on manually scheduling tweets to time with what any of the wide range of free analytics services have told us is the best time to tweet.

Here’s a simple fix using my new favorite social media scheduling service (Buffer) and my favorite Social Media Analytics Service (SocialBro).

1. Sign up for Buffer (using your Twitter login).
2. Install the Google Chrome/Firefox extension.
3. Use it. Basically, every time you click on the button, it will automatically schedule your tweets so you never flood your followers with content. The default setting is four, automatically scheduled posts per day, which seems about right if you want to avoid overwhelming your followers.

4. Sign up for SocialBro (using your Twitter login)
5. Run SocialBro’s Best Time To Tweet report.
6. Use the “Config Buffer  Schedule” button.

7. Whenever possible, use the keywords recommended in the SocialBro report when composing tweets.
8. Repeat weekly: this is the key point, as the best times to tweet are a fluid thing.

Is it perfect? Not even close. But it is, in my week or so of experimenting, give far greater results for user engagement than random guessing, and while you have to update weekly for best results, it’s not as time consuming as manually scheduling each and every post (you can run your own analytics through SocialBro or by simply using the analytics button on Buffer).