• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, May 13, 2014

One of the amusing ironies of marketing and advertising is the way a bunch of urban sophisticates spend huge amounts of time and money trying to understand ordinary people, who would probably find the whole practice bizarre and more than a little creepy if they thought about it much. Of course all those surveys and focus groups and research panels are necessary because the fact is people who go into marketing and advertising are not, in fact, like ordinary folks.

Take social media: it will probably come as a surprise to no one that advertising and marketing professionals are way more -- no, make that way, way, way more active on social media than “normal” people, according to survey results from Heat, a creative agency based in San Francisco. 

According to Heat 97% of advertising and marketing professionals have an account on Facebook, compared to 82% of normal folks -- and that’s actually the smallest differential identified by the survey. For example 92% of ad and marketing pros are on Twitter, compared to 39% of normal folks; 53% of the former are on Instagram, compared to 6% of normals; 57% of ad/marketing pros are on Pinterest, compared to 11% of normals; and 34% are on Tumblr, compared to 7% of normals. 

No surprise, ad and marketing pros are much more likely to pay attention to brand posts on their Facebook feed, with 71% saying they always pay attention, compared to just 23% of normal folks. Similarly 92% of marketing and ad pros say they use Twitter to follow brands they like, versus just 33% of normal people.

These latter disparities point to an interesting question that is sort of implicit in the whole study: do ad and marketing professionals think that normal people pay the same amount of attention to brands on social media, or are they -- meaning the pros -- simply paying attention to them out of professional diligence, and fully aware that most people just ignore them?