Cars.com #newcarface

Cars.com is an automotive advertising company who prides themselves on the engage car shopping audience they provide to the dealers who pay them. While car shoppers are engaged with the website and car shopping experience, there is a large opportunity to gain a social media following with the company. Luckily their marketing team recognized this as a great opportunity to grow social media presence as part of their core marketing strategy. This gave birth to the #newcarface contest, which has been running for nearly a year.

#newcarface is a social media campaign meant to drive engagement with dealer listings and make the car shopping experience more fun. On the same note #newcarface is also meant to grow the car shopping audience and establish Cars.com as the go-to source of all information for car shoppers, driving engagement with the entire site. The basis of #newcarface is consumers will post a picture of themselves with their recently purchased vehicle and a witty caption, of course including #newcarface. Chosen winners get $25,000 towards their car loan. This has lead to some very fun commercials integrated into their ongoing “All Drive, No Drama”, as well as some great user-generated posts.


The success of the #newcarface campaign can be shown in follower counts. The Cars.com Instagram account, which was non-existent in early 2014, has racked up over 900 followers. The Twitter account has been the real winner for this campaign. Followers have breached 69,000 in recent months, but the real success on twitter is user engagement. According to BirdSong Analytics Cars.com has an engagement rate of 4.17% with their followers. This is quadruple the average engagement of twitter followers, which sits at just over 1%.

#NEWCARFACE