Best Of The Twin Counties: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who votes in Best Of The Twin Counties and why it matters

Best Of The Twin Counties exists because the Rocky Mount Telegram serves a readership that cares which businesses in its coverage area do the job well. The Telegram is a newspaper anchored in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and its best-of ballot asks the simplest question a community publication can put to its audience: which Twin Counties businesses are your favorites? The ballot page's own headline line says exactly that, "Vote for your favorite Twin Counties businesses!", and everything about the program follows from it.

The people who vote are the Telegram's readers and, more broadly, residents of the Twin Counties market who want to see a local restaurant, shop or service business recognized. That is why the ballot is a community exercise rather than a juried award. Nobody on the Telegram staff picks the winners; supporters do, business by business, through the Second Street ballot the Telegram hosts under its own name.

For a business on the ballot, the value is the visibility that comes from a readers-choice endorsement in its own market. For the Telegram, the ballot is part of how the newspaper connects with the business community it covers. Both sides get something from the same mechanism: readers express a preference, businesses gain recognition, and the newspaper anchors a community conversation around the Twin Counties economy each year the program runs.

Confirmed editions ran in 2025 and returned in 2026, so the Telegram has carried this ballot across more than one cycle. That history matters to a supporter deciding whether to invest effort in a push: the program is not a one-off experiment but a recurring fixture in the Telegram's contest calendar, run on the same Second Street setup each time.

The confirmed voting window and what the Telegram has not published

The dated side of this program is short and precise. The 2025 edition's voting round ran from September 15 through September 30, 2025, a roughly two-week window in the second half of September. Those dates come from the live Second Street ballot itself, which makes them the anchor fact for understanding how the Telegram schedules the program: voting is a compact round, not a months-long open season.

Editions are confirmed for 2025 plus 2026. The 2026 edition exists at the Telegram's Second Street address with the year updated in the path, but no round dates for 2026 are published in anything the Telegram has put out for this program, so the opening and closing dates for the newest edition are something to confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Several other details sit in the same unpublished category. The Telegram's ballot page carries no category roster, so how many business groupings the current edition holds is visible only on the page itself. No per-supporter rule is published either: whether a supporter may return daily, vote once per round, or something in between, the Telegram has not stated it in any text this program carries. And no eligibility terms for businesses appear alongside the ballot.

None of that is unusual for a regional readers-choice ballot. Small newspapers often keep the mechanics on the ballot page itself and leave nothing to summarize elsewhere. The practical consequence for a supporter or a business is simple: the Telegram's own Second Street page is the single authority for what the current edition allows, and it is worth a fresh look before each round rather than relying on last year's details.

How a supporter votes on the Second Street ballot today

Voting in Best Of The Twin Counties is a literal, public mechanic on the ballot page. A supporter opens the Telegram's Second Street address for the current edition, sees the business groupings presented for that year, picks a favorite in each grouping they care about, and presses the vote control. The page itself governs everything at the moment of voting: whether the round is open, what it asks of the supporter, and what happens after a vote is logged.

The confirmed 2025 round gave supporters the window from September 15 to September 30 to do this. Within that window, the ballot was simply open; no separate nomination phase is published for this program, so the round a supporter experienced was the voting round itself. If the Telegram ever adds a nomination stage or changes the structure, that change will show on the ballot page for the edition concerned.

Because no per-supporter rule is published, the honest guidance is to let the live page decide how often to return. Second Street applies whatever controls the Telegram has configured, and a supporter who follows the page's own prompts will be inside them by definition.

One more practical point: the 2025 and 2026 editions live at separate addresses, each with its year in the path. A supporter arriving from an old link should check which edition the page shows before voting, because a vote cast on a closed round does nothing for the business. Typing the Telegram's Second Street address fresh, or following the Telegram's own promotion of the current round, is the reliable route to the open ballot.

How this ballot sits beside its North Carolina neighbours

Best Of The Twin Counties is one of several best-of ballots across North Carolina, each run under its own publisher with its own market. The Best of North Carolina program covers the entire state under its own separate organizer, while the Twin Counties ballot answers to the Rocky Mount Telegram alone and covers only the Telegram's market. A business nominated in one carries no standing in the other.

Other neighbours in the same vertical include the Charlotte Magazine Best of the Best Awards, anchored on the Charlotte magazine market; the Daily Reflector Best Of Pitt County, a newspaper ballot in the Pitt County market; and the Fayetteville Community's Choice Awards, anchored on Fayetteville. The 2025 Diamond Awards and the 910Preps Fans' Choice Boys Soccer Player of the Year round out the set, the latter being a sports fan vote rather than a business ballot.

What distinguishes the Twin Counties program within this group is its size and its anchor. It is a single-newspaper ballot for a mid-sized eastern North Carolina market, whereas Charlotte's program sits in one of the state's largest metros. The mechanic, a public Second Street vote, is the common thread, but each program's categories, windows and rules are set independently by its own publisher, so a supporter moving between them should read each ballot's own page rather than assuming one program's details carry across.