Best of Billings: How Voting Works & How to Win

Two ballots share a Billings address; only one is billingsgazette.com

Two different websites will tell a Billings business it's running for "best of." Only one of them is billingsgazette.com/contests/best-of-billings/, the Billings Gazette's own confirmed ballot page, an annual Lee Enterprises program with a live 2025 cycle. The other isn't a typo or an outdated link. It's a completely separate contest.

That second program, Community Votes Billings, runs at billings.communityvotes.com under Metroland Media, a company with no connection to the Gazette or to Lee Enterprises. Same city, a nearly interchangeable name, two ballots that share nothing else. A vote cast on one does nothing for a nominee sitting on the other.

Everything in that table traces back to the Gazette's own domain, not a reseller's summary or a secondhand screenshot. A business that's heard "you should enter Billings' best of" from a customer or a competitor needs to ask which one before building a single graphic, since the wrong link wastes the entire push.

What Lee Enterprises confirms here, and what still needs the live page

The organizer, the URL, and the backend all check out. A category list, a vote limit, or a specific 2025 close date don't appear anywhere in the record behind this guide, and rather than guess at any of the three, the honest move is naming the gap and pointing at the source that actually has the answer: billingsgazette.com/contests/best-of-billings/, read live.

Why "SecondStreet" is a company name, not a Billings Gazette invention

SecondStreet is Lee Enterprises' shared voting infrastructure, the same vendor platform underneath the Montana Standard's Best of Butte & Beyond almost 250 miles southwest in Butte. Both papers answer to the same parent company and lean on the same ballot engine, and that resemblance is exactly why a Billings business shouldn't assume Butte's nomination process, or its dates, apply here too. Each paper runs its own SecondStreet install on its own calendar.

A business planning around a Whitefish or Butte deadline heard secondhand from another paper's staff is planning around the wrong year, the wrong platform instance, or both. Best of Billings answers only to billingsgazette.com, checked directly, during whichever window the Gazette itself has open.

Where Best of Billings sits among Montana's other 'vote for a business' ballots

Four programs, four different companies, one overlapping habit, all listed together on the Montana contest hub: ask Montana readers to click a link and pick a favorite business. Best of Billings is only one entry in a genuinely confusing field, and knowing which one is in front of you matters before a single vote gets cast.

Two of those four run on SecondStreet, but under two different parent companies. Lee Enterprises owns both the Gazette's Billings ballot and the Standard's Butte ballot; Hagadone News Network, a separate publisher entirely, licenses the same engine for Whitefish, well over 300 miles northwest. Shared software, unrelated ownership, unrelated results. A business planning any of these pushes will find the award-vote playbook useful background, though the actual deadline and category name only ever belong to the one ballot it actually entered.

Who a Billings Gazette ballot actually reaches beyond city limits

Montana's largest city gives this contest more categories to fill than most other papers in the state could realistically manage: restaurants, contractors, retail, services, arts, more than a small-town ballot could support without half the slots sitting empty.

The Gazette's readership stretches well past the city line. Huntley and Broadview sit out toward the county's eastern grain country, closer to ranch country than retail strips. Laurel, a short stretch upriver from Billings, keeps its own small commercial core that still falls inside typical Gazette circulation. Lockwood and Shepherd, both wedged between Billings and the interstate, function less like separate towns and more like an extension of the city's own edge.

None of that is a confirmed ballot category. The Gazette hasn't published one that splits Best of Billings by geography rather than by business type. A coffee shop in Worden competes in whatever category the Gazette lists, the same one a downtown Billings coffee shop enters; distance from the courthouse doesn't create a separate bracket.

Food-service nominees carry particular weight on a ballot this size. A restaurant deciding how hard to push a nomination might find the restaurant vote campaign guide useful for pacing, regardless of which Montana paper's ballot it actually entered.

Billings runs a second, entirely unrelated vote too: the KTVQ Billings Athlete of the Week, a weekly station feature for area high schools. A downtown shop owner chasing a Best of Billings nomination and a KTVQ nominee's classmates sharing that week's post never really overlap, same home city, unconnected audiences.

Two mistakes that sink a Best of Billings push before results post

Most campaigns don't fail because customers don't care. They fail on two avoidable mistakes: pointing people at the wrong ballot, and claiming a result before the Gazette has published one.

The first mistake is a link problem. A "vote for us in Billings' best of" post with no URL, or worse, a link to Community Votes Billings by accident, sends a genuinely willing supporter nowhere useful. The fix costs nothing: share the exact billingsgazette.com/contests/best-of-billings/ page, under the right category, every time.

The second mistake is patience, or the lack of it. No results-publication format is confirmed anywhere in the record checked for this guide, no print section, no announced results page, so there's no shortcut to knowing who won before the Gazette itself says so. Calling a nomination a win early gets noticed fast by competitors and customers who both know better.

Between those two fixes sits the ordinary work: reminding real customers more than once during the live window, in a market where the same chamber contacts and regulars circulate constantly. The online contest voting guide covers the mechanics behind a push like this one, and the legality primer is worth reading before a single dollar goes toward any readers-choice campaign.