Wake Weekly Best of the Best: How Voting Works & How to Win

What is the Wake Weekly Best of the Best and who runs it?

The Wake Weekly Best of the Best is a community best-of ballot for the Wilson, North Carolina area. Wake Weekly, the newspaper behind it, asks readers to name the businesses around town they rate highest, and the honors recognize local firms and services rather than athletes, animals or photographs. For readers the format is a familiar one: a hometown paper lets its audience celebrate the firms they already trust, and the winners walk away with recognition they can point to all year.

Balloting runs on Second Street. The paper's ballot lives under the wilsondailytimes.secondstreetapp.com address, and the edition described on this page sits at the Wake-Weekly-Best-of-the-Best-2025 path there. Second Street labels it a nomination-and-voting ballot, titled "Wake Weekly Best of the Best 2025", which is the fullest self-description the program carries. Outside material fills in the publisher picture: one business profile describes "the Wake Weekly owned by Restoration Media (the local newspaper)", and the same source ties the paper's coverage to Wilson, North Carolina.

Because the program salutes businesses rather than individual people, it reads closer to chamber-style recognition than to a player-of-the-week fan poll, and its nearest cousins are the other community ballots listed later on this page.

When has the Wake Weekly Best of the Best run, and when does voting happen?

Wake Weekly has kept this program going longer than most community ballots in North Carolina. The first confirmed edition was in 2012, and confirmed runs followed in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025. No confirmed edition falls in 2016 or in the stretch from 2018 through 2020, so the habit is annual even though the run is not unbroken. A business that lists the honor among its credentials puts it plainly: it is "an award that is voted on by the community every year."

The dated anchor for the program's current shape is the 2025 voting round, which opened June 20, 2025 and closed July 25, 2025. What the paper has not attached to the ballot is a second layer of detail: the ballot carries a nomination-and-voting label, yet no dates for a separate nomination stage appear anywhere. Wake Weekly also does not print the category roster, a cap on repeat voting, or voter eligibility next to the ballot; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

How does a supporter vote in the Wake Weekly Best of the Best?

Casting a pick in this ballot takes only a few minutes. While the round is open, a reader loads the current edition under the paper's wilsondailytimes.secondstreetapp.com address, browses the categories that year's ballot carries, and backs a favorite in each race worth supporting. Once those picks are in, the ballot's submission control logs them, and each choice counts toward the community result.

Three practical points follow from what the ballot shows. First, the edition carries the title "Wake Weekly Best of the Best 2025", and Second Street files it under its nomination-and-voting format, which means a reader might be asked to put a business name forward as well as to choose from a prepared list; what actually appears depends on the layout when the page opens. Second, nothing on the page states a sign-in requirement, so a supporter should simply follow the prompts sitting in front of them. Third, the ballot behaves like any other Second Street page in a browser, which means a phone handles it as readily as a desktop.

One caution belongs here too: the window is finite. The 2025 round wrapped in late July, and a pick submitted after a round closes accomplishes nothing. Anyone who cares about a particular Wilson business should reach the ballot while the current window is still open.

How does this Wilson ballot compare with other North Carolina community votes?

North Carolina carries a crowded lineup of community best-of ballots, and this one occupies a specific niche in it. The statewide Best of North Carolina ballot sweeps the whole state, while the Daily Reflector Best Of Pitt County and the Fayetteville Community's Choice Awards serve their own eastern North Carolina markets. Wake Weekly's ballot is the Wilson-area counterpart: same public-vote family, much smaller home turf.

Three further siblings round out the state's slate. The Charlotte Magazine Best of the Best Awards bring a big-city magazine audience to the format, the 2025 Diamond Awards run as a named-award program, and the 910Preps Fans' Choice Boys Soccer Player of the Year poll narrows the idea to a single sports honor. Against that backdrop, Wake Weekly's edition stands out for its longevity, with confirmed editions stretching back to 2012, and for its focus on businesses around Wilson rather than on people or single categories.

Where these ballots part ways, for the people casting picks in them, is scale. A statewide ballot draws from every corner of North Carolina, while a community ballot of this size is decided by a much smaller pool of neighbors, which makes individual participation and organized outreach proportionally more visible in the final result.

What helps a nominee gather support during the Wake Weekly voting window?

A nominee who wants stronger numbers in this ballot should work the strengths the program already has. The round falls in June and July, when the paper's readers are out and about around town, and past honorees treat the award as a lasting credential: one tax firm lists wins for Best Local Tax Preparer/Accountant from 2012 through 2023 on its own profile. That is the pitch to hand customers, since a few seconds on the ballot turns into recognition the business can cite for years afterward.

Concretely, ask regulars in person, share the ballot address on the channels customers already follow, and send reminders early in the round rather than in its final days. Because the edition sits at one fixed Second Street address for the whole cycle, a reminder can carry the complete Wake-Weekly-Best-of-the-Best-2025 link straight to the voting page, which removes a step between the customer and the pick. The broader playbook lives in the guide to getting more votes online. Wake Weekly posts no policy about outside help with voting, so anything a nominee arranges should stay within whatever the ballot itself asks of participants.