Mass Comm Week 2021: Virginia Alves and “What’s NEXT in Social Media”

By Allison Schroeder
Web Content Assistant Manager

Virginia Alves, a Texas State University School of Journalism and Mass Communication alumna, has seen great success in her career.

Alves graduated from Texas State in 2015 with a Bachelor’s of Science degree in public relations with a concentration in digital media. She wishes that she could have majored in DMI (digital media innovation), but has seen a benefit from her public relations background.

“Public relations was great and I think it was a really great way to just know more about, I guess, social media without the digital media side of it,” Alves said. “[It] gave me a really good background on like brand voice and things like that which I maybe wouldn’t have gotten if I’d done journalism.”

Alves is grateful for the connections her parents had after she graduated and obtained her first job as a social media editor for the 2016 Rio Olympics and the Paralympic Organizing Committee.

“In 2016, I worked for the Rio 2016 Olympics being a social media editor, and I got that job 100 percent through my parents’ network,” said Alves. “At first, I was really like kind of embarrassed about it and was kind of like ‘oh like I don’t want to tell people about this,’ but now honestly, I took that job and showed them that I was supposed to be there, and I became this person that was like a very invaluable part of their team.”

After the Rio Olympics, Alves continued to dabble into temporary jobs and gain connections. She took her experience and connections to New York in June 2018 without a job, but eventually led Alves to her job at Insider Inc. in Sept. 2018.

“I applied to like 150 jobs,” Alves said.  “September of 2018 is when I got a job at Insider as an intern back then, it turned into a fellowship halfway through they like rebranded their program.”

Alves’ fellowship then turned into a full-time job where she worked weekends at Insider Inc. Two years later she was promoted to distribution editor where she works Monday through Friday in a management position.

Her day-to-day role consists of managing two fellows, editing content to go out onto accounts, and strategizing which content goes to which account because of Insider Inc.’s different niches.

Since working at Insider Inc., Alves noted a consistency in how she and her colleagues worked, especially after going remote due to COVID-19.

“It didn’t actually affect that much so a lot of just the way Insider was built we just used slack for like everything anyway,” Alves said. “So basically, all we had to do was like just make sure that the weekday people could keep up with the whole staying home thing, and they did, so it didn’t really change that much.”

Insider Inc. is still remote, but they continue to innovate and find new ways to reach audiences through their social media accounts, and they have also opened applications to their fellowship program.

To learn more about Alves and her path to Insider Inc. listen to the full interview below. You can also follow Alves on her Twitter here.

Featured Image by Allison Schroeder