Best of Ocean City: How Voting Works & How to Win

One shop, one poll, forty-two ballots

A boardwalk arcade doesn't run against a crab-house restaurant in Best of Ocean City. It can't. OceanCity.com splits the entire program into 42 separate polls across four groups (restaurants, things-to-do, bars, and boardwalk), so every business competes inside its own lane. Miss that structure and a "vote for us" post can send supporters to the wrong page entirely.

Voting itself runs on two channels at once: the OceanCity.com website and the OceanCity.com Facebook page, combined into one tally per poll. The organizer's own line on influence is blunt: results have "nothing to do with advertising." Confirmed cycles ran in 2023, 2025, and 2026, and the 2025 round pulled 125,000+ votes across all 42 polls combined.

See the Maryland contest hub for how this compares to other statewide programs, and the USA contest index for the full map.

What OceanCity.com hasn't told anyone

No published close date. No per-poll vote counts. No stated per-day or per-email cap. No public winners archive on this page. That's four real gaps, and each one changes how a business should plan, so it's worth naming them plainly instead of papering over them with confident-sounding filler.

The gap that costs campaigns votes

The 125,000+ figure is the only scale number OceanCity.com has released, and it covers the whole program, not any single poll. A restaurant owner asking "how many votes did last year's winner get" won't find that answer here or, as far as public records show, anywhere else. Plan around participation and reach, not a target number pulled from thin air.

Businesses building a campaign plan for a similar readers-choice format can compare notes against best business award voting or award contest voting, useful for structure, not a substitute for OceanCity.com's own current rules.

How the mechanics actually work

Two links, not one. Because voting is combined across the OceanCity.com website and its Facebook page, a supporter who only sees the Facebook post may never find the matching website poll, and vice versa. Keep both live and identical.

The four-step process is simple in outline: open the live ballot, find the exact poll and category (restaurants, things-to-do, bars, or boardwalk), submit, then return only within whatever rule the current form states. What trips people up isn't the mechanic. It's assuming last year's link, category label, or screenshot still applies. OceanCity.com restructures details year to year, so treat every prior cycle's page as historical reference only.

For the broader mechanics of how paid and organic vote outreach differ across contest types generally, see how online votes work.

The area this program actually serves

Ocean City is the center, but its customer base runs wider. Berlin, West Ocean City, Fenwick Island, Ocean Pines, Selbyville, Bishopville, Whaleyville, Newark, and Snow Hill are real communities feeding the resort corridor's visitor and local traffic, not invented contest divisions, and not every business in each town qualifies.

That inland-to-boardwalk spread is exactly why a Snow Hill service business and a beachfront restaurant need different campaigns even inside the same contest. One sells to neighbors. The other sells to strangers passing through for a week. Businesses working with a local creator or tourism influencer can also see influencer poll voting for adjacent outreach ideas.

Running a campaign without guessing

No fake accounts. No scripted voting. No "winner" language before OceanCity.com actually publishes one. Past that baseline, the honest version of a campaign here is closer to a marketing checklist than a growth hack: get the exact poll link right, tell customers exactly which category to look for, and repeat the reminder more than once because a single post gets buried fast on Facebook.

An email or text list of past customers is the strongest asset most small Ocean City businesses already own. In-store signage and a short staff line at checkout add a second layer for walk-in traffic. None of it guarantees a placement, and no paid promotion should claim otherwise, particularly given the organizer's own statement that results have "nothing to do with advertising."

Businesses comparing how a similar readers-choice format runs elsewhere can look at Best of New Jersey or Best of Brooklyn, same general shape, different market and rules.