Salary Survey Extra is a series of weekly dispatches that give added insight into the findings of both our annual Salary Survey and our smaller Salary Survey PLUS polls. These posts contain previously unpublished Salary Survey data.

Thanks to corporate America's (corporate everywhere's, really) still dubiously beneficial imperative to "have a presence" on social media, employees who use a computer to get their work done every day have a viable excuse to occasionally pop over to Facebook or Twitter and, you know, see what's happening. "I had to tweet the company's fourth-quarter financial earnings," is the new, "No, that was just a five-minute power nap on my smoke break."

It's equally vital, in the minds of many, for individuals to have a strong, engaged social media profile. You might need those credentials, for example, to impress your next employer. Or it could help you stay current and engaged in various aspects of whatever IT realm is your area of expertise. Many IT security professionals stay abreast of the latest news about security threats and incidents using Twitter or various news aggregation apps.

For these and other reasons, we included a special query about social media usage at the end of our recently concluded Cybersecurity Salary Survey. Here's how that question appeared on the survey:

The social networking tool I care most about is:‍

• ‍Facebook
• Twitter
• Instagram
• Pinterest
• LinkedIn
• Myspace
• Google+
• Rolodex

‍The big winner, it turns out, is the employment networking site LinkedIn, which helps users detail their professional background and connect to hundreds of other individuals in an ever-expanding web that eventually forges cyberbonds of workerhood between enterprising linkers and everyone from Kevin Bacon to Pope Francis. Theoretically, anyway. Some have also reported that LinkedIn's biggest impact is in units of time spent deleting e-mails from people requesting you to join their network. (E-mails that many in-Linked professionals claim never to have sent in the first place. Darn auto-invites!)

At any rate, nearly 43 percent of security professionals who responded to our survey prefer LinkedIn to all other options, or at least to all of the other options we listed. The Force is also strong with Facebook, the first choice of 38.4 percent of those surveyed, meaning that social media preference is a surprisingly binary choice for most. One either allocates the primary focus of one's social media effort to LinkedIn, or one allocates it to Facebook.

Twitter, somewhat shockingly, is the first-choice tool of a mere 7.1 percent of those surveyed. That's better than Google+ (2.8 percent) and Instagram (2 percent), but even this classic gizmo is still first in the hearts of 4.7 percent of respondents. Or, you know, maybe those 4.7 percent are really Twitter (or LinkedIn, or Facebook) users who just enjoy a good survey wisecrack.

HOLEY SUSTENANCE—Cybersecurity pros have strong opinions about one of the most preeminent items available for mid-morning office snacking. We asked how those surveyed how they take their bagel— with or without schmear— we found that there's a pronounced preference for flavored cream cheese products. About 34 percent require schmear, compared to just 7.7 percent who are schmear-averse. Yes, that adds up to fewer than half of 100 percent. We actually worded the question, "The best way to eat a bagel is," and the other choices were "When it's actually a donut" (28.8 percent) and "Either way, I'm not touching it unless there's coffee" (29.8 percent).