Agreed.

We use Google mostly for adverts, and we're showing about a $1 per user acquisition rate. That's not CTR rate, that's

clicked ad->saw site->signed up.

At almost $2 just to get a "like", I would be very hard pressed to justify that.

"we averaged $1.83 per 'like'"

"what's a 'like'?"

"somebody click the like button next to us in Facebook"

"how much money is that worth to us?"

"well, it identifies interested people in our service who we can advertise to later"

"so we now know about people who might be interested in our service if we decide to spend even more money advertising to them?"

"basically"

That's about the market rate for buying likes on Facebook (the company I work for used to offer this as a service).

Targeted likes or just likes in general? There are folks on Fiverr who can deliver untargeted likes at 10 cents a pop (which might be useful for the initial social proof). No idea how they do it but I tried as an experiment and they don't all look like zombies.

That seems really low for me. The only way we could have done that would be to use low value inventory like from developing countries, but usually the advertisers had a certain demo that they wanted to reach and that raised the price.

Yeah, the demo is probably not good at all. But in terms of building up a few hundreds likes in order to get social proof for later folks, it's an option at least.

Is there an industry standard on $/like?

It seems like you can't really judge how much you should spend per like because you haven't yet calculated the revenue and profits per like.

I've heard anywhere from .50 to 1.50, but you can sell them for anywhere from 3-$7 if you're an agency :-)