The 10 Year Challenge was huge (#10YearChallenge). A reach of 30 billion, with participation from politicians, celebrities, news agencies and sports brands plus millions from the general public. Within a small number of days it had been used for self promotion, climate change, comedy, politics, sports and many many more topics. The meme encapsulated the many varied facets of viral consumer orientated social media.

A popular question was who (or what) started the 10 Year Challenge in the first place and why? Popular opinion places this at the door of Facebook. However, they came forward and said it was not started by them.

It started life as #HowHardDidAgingHitYou challenge and a more positive spin variant; #GlowUp challenge. Fears started to spread that it had a sinister side and this helped to kill the upward trend with some going as far as deleting their meme related posts.

Me 10 years ago: probably would have played along with the profile picture aging meme going around on Facebook and Instagram
Me now: ponders how all this data could be mined to train facial recognition algorithms on age progression and age recognition

— Kate O’Neill (@kateo) January 12, 2019

Lets examine 6 things we learnt from the “10 Year Challenge” meme.

Number 1 – The 10 Year Challenge Was a Viral Meme but It Had a Short Effective Life.

The 10 Year Challenge followed the very familiar bell curve for a trending social media meme. However it had a higher peak but a shorter span compared to many popular memes of the recent past.

Savvy agencies and social listening experts would have noticed the step upside of the curve and gathered the smart and the humorous within their ranks to create a social media masterpiece to take advantage of the escalating interest.

The 10 Year Challenge was a quick one. It started trending on the 12th January and by the 18th of January it had started on it’s downward trajectory.

It reached just under 1,500,000 posts per day at its peak, with a total reach in excess of 30,000,000,000.

Number 2 – The 10 Year Challenge Had a Wide Selection of Content Themes.

One of the reasons why the 10 Year Challenge was so popular was because it had many themes that propelled it along. Comparisons were made from a wide selection of themes. Some of the most popular were age, makeup, fashion, and lifestyle.

Number 3 – Did the 10 Year Challenge Produce an Explosion of Selfies Fueling a Gradual Acceptance of
Narcissism?

This is a hot topic, the link with selfies and narcissism. I will explore this topic in more depth in another post. The 10 Year Challenge fueled millions of selfies. I found some people running to upload their 10 year challenge based on selfies but they had vehemently objected to their use especially in social media.

A hot trend like this one can make the selfie seem acceptable in a way. I hardly heard the objection to selfie taking while the trend was burning hot.

Some people did resist. I liked this tweet by an honest tweeter; “I haven’t done the 10 year challenge cause my looks have just gone down the drain in the past 10 years”

Number 4 – The 10 Year Challenge Was Not Only About Pictures.

How could your 10 Year Challenge post stand out from the avalanche of still images? Using video and GIFs of course! Avoiding still images gave many the opportunity to be extra creative.

Key takeaway here was jumping onboard but in a way that would have made your #10YearChallenge stand out. I found over 10,000 GIFs supporting the #10YearChallenge during the 6 days of hot trending action.

Number 5 – Brands Eventually Joined in With the 10 Year Challenge in a Big Way.

Brands love to join in with hot trending social media stuff. Agencies adore prodding the brands that they have a working relationship to get the authorization to allow them to be unleashed to create a gem. The thought of it going viral while featuring the brand’s products or services is often too much to resist.

I described this phenomenon in my post about the challenge based on what color “The Dress” was. I can hold my hand up on this one as I was involved in a minor role in my company posting along with that trend but happily ours was seen as one of the best from a brand at that time.

Here are some brands that took part in the #10YearChallenge;

Many well known companies joined in with the 10 Year Challenge; most deployed a subtle link to their brand promise…

• Marvel Studios
• Real Madrid
• UEFA Champions league
• SportsCenter
• CNN
• Manchester United
• The BBC
• Xbox

Number 6 – The Sentiment From the 10 Year Challenge Was a Mix of Good and Bad.

I saw my fair share of amusing posts around the 10 Year Challenge. However it was not all positive. Some people expressed their frustration with the avalanche of trending posts. This is one of my favorite tweets that I found; wishing it would all end.

Here is how the split looked like when comparing the negative sentiment from the #10YearChallenge with the positive across all social media, based on the time period shown in the above volume diagram.

Some posts were made to highlight the troublesome issues that the human race was facing at the time. Climate change was featured a lot. An example of the negative sentiment; “The only #10yearchallenge we need to worry about is Plastic Pollution”.

Some more examples;

Finally…

• Did you or your company take part in the #10YearChallenge?
• Or were you negative about the whole thing and wanted all the fuss to pass on to the next social media meme?