About Town's Best of Birmingham: How Voting Works & How to Win

What 'includes' leaves open about About Town's Best of Birmingham

"Includes." That one word in About Town Magazine's own description of its Best of Birmingham program carries more weight than it looks like. Three categories are named for the 2025 issue, Music Venues, Dining, and a professional Top Doctors feature, and nothing in the public materials checked for this guide closes that list off at three.

The program runs on an annual cycle, anchored at abouttown.io/issue/best-of-2025/. A fixed nomination window, an exact close date, and a per-vote cap: none of the three appears anywhere About Town has published. Confirm those directly on the live page rather than assume a prior cycle's numbers still apply.

Why "includes" is not the same as "the full list"

Reading "includes professional categories" and stopping there risks treating a preview as an index. Three named categories are real and checkable right now; a fourth, fifth, or sixth may exist without having turned up in what's confirmed for this guide.

None of this is a knock on About Town's own materials. A short preview inside a magazine feature is normal; treating it as exhaustive would be the actual mistake. Whatever the final category count turns out to be, the underlying campaign question stays the same, and buying award votes walks through that question on its own.

About Town's Best of Birmingham next to Alabama's other readers-choice ballots

Three Alabama programs currently promise some version of "best of," and Best of Birmingham is only one of them. Best of Bama runs the whole state under four fixed groups. Anniston Star Readers' Choice covers a market to the northeast. Neither carries anything resembling a Top Doctors feature.

Alabama Magazine's Best of Bama is a statewide ballot with four named groups, Restaurants, People, Places, and Entertainment, run by the magazine at its own domain. Anniston sits roughly an hour's drive northeast, and the Anniston Star Readers' Choice Awards is that market's own ballot, published by a paper with no tie to About Town Magazine.

A Birmingham business also weighing a Best of Bama nomination is running two separate campaigns with two separate pages, not one message that fits both. A physician's practice carries a third question on top of that: whether Top Doctors even shares Music Venues and Dining's public-vote mechanic, which the next section takes on directly.

One hub, three named categories, and the Top Doctors question mark

One address carries the whole program: abouttown.io/issue/best-of-2025/. About Town handles the mechanics itself instead of outsourcing to one of the syndicated ballot platforms other city magazines lean on, which removes a layer of guesswork about who actually controls the page. It doesn't remove the risk of an outdated link circulating well after a cycle closes, so the exact 2025 URL, not a bookmarked search result from a prior year, is the one worth sharing.

Nomination-then-vote is the pattern for Music Venues and Dining: a business goes up, then the public picks. Top Doctors plays by different rules in a lot of city magazines, where that kind of feature often comes from physicians rating each other rather than an open public poll, sometimes farmed out to a separate research firm entirely. Whether About Town's version works that way, or simply shares the consumer-category mechanic, isn't spelled out anywhere confirmed for this guide.

A medical practice weighing outreach for Top Doctors specifically should ask About Town directly how that category actually gathers entries, rather than assume the Music Venues playbook applies. A restaurant or a venue chasing its own category has a simpler task: find the live nomination path on the 2025 issue page and confirm whether a cap or close date has been added since this guide was written.

Birmingham's over-the-mountain map and where a Best of push actually lands

A magazine built around Dining and Music Venues coverage can't stay downtown-only for long. Homewood, Mountain Brook, and Vestavia Hills, the corridor locals shorthand as "over the mountain," carry a dense, walkable concentration of restaurants and bars distinct from downtown's convention-and-office footprint.

Hoover adds a fourth, larger suburb to that southern cluster. Five Points South, Avondale, and Cahaba Heights each carry their own share of the bars, venues, and restaurants a Music Venues or Dining nomination is likely to draw from. None of that geography comes from About Town's own program materials; it's ordinary Birmingham layout, and it matters because a Dining nominee's real customer base often lives within a handful of these specific pockets, not spread evenly across the whole metro.

A Top Doctors nominee works on a different map. A medical practice's support tends to cluster around wherever its actual clinic sits, and a physician splitting time between two office locations, one over the mountain, one closer to downtown, may be pulling from two distinct patient networks rather than one. Restaurant vote campaign guidance fits a Dining nomination specifically; it has little to say about a professional category built on a different mechanic entirely.

Running a legitimate campaign, whether the category is Dining or Top Doctors

A Dining or Music Venues nomination lives or dies on one basic move: get the people who already show up, regulars, the after-work crowd, a loyal booking list, to click through to their specific listing on abouttown.io/issue/best-of-2025/ before the window closes. A bare "vote for us on About Town" post with no link attached sends someone hunting through an issue page for one name among however many categories genuinely exist.

A Top Doctors nomination runs on a different kind of trust. If that category turns out to run on physician peer input rather than a public click, patient outreach asking people to "vote" is aimed at a process that may not take public votes at all, which is reason enough to confirm the mechanic with About Town before a practice spends staff time promoting the wrong action. Fake accounts and bought engagement carry risk either way; a metro this interconnected tends to notice an inflated claim faster than a larger one would.

Until the 2025 issue actually prints or posts a name, "nominated" is the accurate word, not "won." Is buying votes legal is worth reading before committing budget to either kind of category, and how online contest votes work covers mechanics that carry over from a Dining push to a Music Venues one, though not necessarily to Top Doctors.