From Broadcast to Belonging: Building a Community-Led Social Media Engine

Founded in 2018, LEISURE has established itself as a leader in Qatar's entertainment sector. Backed by a $700M investment and managed by a 100% Qatari-owned company, LEISURE brings together over 300 experts from diverse fields. The company anchors its portfolio with three iconic theme parks at Doha Festival City: Angry Birds World Park; Snow Dunes Park & Virtuocity Esports Park.

Since July 2023, LEISURE has executed a fundamental transformation of its social media philosophy, successfully shifting from a one-way promotional broadcast channel into a dynamic, participation-driven community engine. This strategic overhaul was designed to directly fuel measurable business outcomes: increased real-world attendance, higher repeat visitation rates, and the cultivation of enduring brand trust across its diverse entertainment portfolio. It consciously moved beyond the industry standard where social platforms are used merely for transactional announcements or retrospective event coverage.

The core of this innovation lies in a radical repositioning of social media as an integral, real-time extension of the physical guest experience. This paradigm shift was most masterfully demonstrated through the Virtuocity Esports League (VEL) and Virtuocity Battleground (VBG). Here, social channels were embedded as the live narrative layer of the tournament ecosystem, continuously capturing raw player reactions, immersive audience energy, and evolving competitive storylines. This approach transformed isolated events into a persistent, engaging saga that audiences could actively follow, anticipate, and participate in, fostering a sense of ongoing ownership and community that far surpasses the impact of traditional event promotion.

Three foundational strategic pillars underpin and sustain this community-led model:

1. Championing Authentic Voices as Primary Content: LEISURE deliberately institutionalized User-Generated Content (UGC) and organic guest experiences as its primary content strategy. By actively curating, showcasing, and reposting real visitor moments, the brand builds unparalleled credibility and emotional connection. This strategy ensures the brand narrative is told through genuine peer perspectives, making marketing feel like a shared celebration rather than a corporate broadcast.
2. Strategic, Trust-Based Influencer Collaborations: Moving away from transactional campaigns, LEISURE focused on deep partnerships with family and lifestyle influencers, particularly parents. These barter-based collaborations are structured as authentic storytelling partnerships, ensuring content remains experience-led and relatable. This positions influencers as trusted community advocates, which resonates profoundly with core family audiences and reinforces the brand's family-first positioning with unmatched authenticity.
3. Ecosystem Integration for Organic Scale and Cultural Relevance: To amplify reach within established networks of trust, LEISURE pioneered a collaborative distribution model by partnering with 13 key local community platforms and digital media pages, including Qatar Living, ILoveQatar, Doha News, and Qatar Day. This strategic move embeds LEISURE's entertainment content natively within existing community conversations and digital habitats. It ensures cultural resonance, maximizes organic impact, and leverages the authority of these platforms to validate the brand within the local social fabric.

This strategy is consistently activated on the ground across all venues:

• At Angry Birds World, social content dynamically highlights daily shows, fixed programming, and seasonal festivals like Flock Fest, creating a perpetual sense of lively, in-progress entertainment that encourages immediate and repeat visits.
• At Snow Dunes, interactive in-park activations like scavenger hunts are supported by coordinated social calls-to-action, blending the physical and digital experience seamlessly.
• Most importantly, recurring, platform-specific social media giveaways are deployed across all parks. These campaigns are engineered to directly convert online engagement into trackable, ticket-based rewards, creating a tangible and effective bridge from digital interaction to physical park visitation and demonstrable ROI.

The results robustly validate the model's effectiveness and industry-leading position. LEISURE's social following on Meta platforms experienced sustained, organic growth from approximately 64,000 in 2023 to 150,000 followers in 2025. This trajectory, reflecting close to 90% year-on-year growth at a key milestone, demonstrates the power of building long-term community loyalty through authentic participation. Unlike growth driven by short-term promotional spikes, this linear increase is a direct outcome of consistent, value-driven engagement that positions social media as a core utility for the brand's community.

By reimagining social media as a co-created storytelling platform where the brand, its guests, and its partners are collaborative narrators, LEISURE has established a scalable and replicable benchmark for social innovation. This case proves conclusively that a community-centric engagement strategy is not merely a marketing tactic, but the fundamental key to driving tangible, sustainable business outcomes in the competitive family entertainment sector.