So you’ve taken the plunge head first into social media. Are your efforts working? How can you find out?

Not so long ago, it was hard to answer that question. Now, that’s not the case. Like most business phenomena’s, social media has matured and with that maturation comes the ability to measure results. While paying money for big-time social media analytics can pay dividends, it’s not necessarily the best- or most realistic path for a small business to pursue.

In today’s post, we profile four tools you can use to help you track the success of your social media. Here they are:

Twitter Analytics

After a long wait, Twitter has finally released an analytics tool that enables you to measure the effectiveness of your tweets. While this feature was only reserved for paid subscribers in the past, now it’s available to everyone for free.

Timeline activity analytics helps you measure the effectiveness of specific, individual tweets. By using it, you can see how many users retweeted you, favorited your tweet, replied to it and clicked through to the link you shared. So if you ever wondered what people were interested in on your timeline, you can now figure it out.

Google+ Ripples

Like Twitter Analytics, Google+ helps you examine the reach of your Google+ posts. That being said, Google Ripples has some very specific guidelines, including:

• You can only use the tool for information you have shared or reshared.
• It doesn’t track comments unless they were reshares
• It only shows public reshares
• If the post wasn’t shared, you can’t even select Ripples as an option from the drop-down.

Even though it’s fairly rigid, it’s helpful when you’re trying to see who was interested in something and who isn’t. It also helps you identify the kinds of things that get the biggest reaction. Oh yeah – it’s free, too!

Klout

Klout has grown up since its days as a glorified popularity platform. Today, it gages interest across several social media platforms to give you an aggregated look at the overall success of your efforts. By using the ‘network breakdown’ feature, you can see what tools get you the most interaction and where you’re having the most success. Even better – answering questions on Klout helps to boost your visibility on certain search engines – especially BING.

Pinterest Analytics

Of the major social networks out there, Pinterest is the one who has been the most prolific on the analytic development front. By using Pinterest analytics, you can track a number of things, including:

• Number of pins
• How many people are pinning materials
• Pins that have been re-pinned
• How many re-pinners you have
• How many times your pins are viewed
• Number of unique visitors to your board a day
• Number of times a visitor clicked through the information you provided.

As you can see, there’s plenty of information to digest there. If you are someone who uses Pinterest, then be sure not to disregard its analytics tool.