Myrtle Beach Herald Readers' Choice: How Voting Works & How to Win

One Myrtle Beach ballot with a very easy name to mix up

Myrtle Beach Herald Readers' Choice is MyHorryNews's annual readers-choice program for Horry County, run at myhorrynews.secondstreetapp.com with broad category coverage; WMBF has been named Best TV Station within it five years running. Both 2025 and 2026 cycles are confirmed active, though a published vote cap or close date is not.

myhorrynews.secondstreetapp.com. Type that address into a browser, not a general search for "Myrtle Beach best of," and there's a real chance the results hand back a different program entirely. The Grand Strand runs four separate best-of ballots under overlapping names, and MyHorryNews's Readers' Choice, the Myrtle Beach Herald's own program, is only one of them.

That matters more than it sounds. A business owner who tells customers to "go vote for us on the Myrtle Beach best-of" has given no useful instruction at all. Four different organizers run four different platforms, and only one of those platforms is the one this business actually entered.

For the fuller lay of the Grand Strand's competing programs, see the Best of the Beach guide, run separately by The Sun News. The South Carolina contest hub lists the rest of the state's readers-choice and fan-vote programs side by side.

What's confirmed for 2025 and 2026, stated plainly

Two years. That's the confirmed run: the 2025 cycle and the 2026 cycle, both active on MyHorryNews's platform. Beyond that timeline and the platform address itself, the public record thins out fast, and pretending otherwise would do a business planning a campaign no favors.

The one category data point worth building on

WMBF has been named Best TV Station inside this program five years running. That single, repeated result is useful for a different reason than it first appears: it confirms this ballot runs a media or broadcast category alongside whatever else falls under "broad category coverage," a phrase MyHorryNews uses without publishing the full list. One repeat winner beats a guess at the whole roster.

No published vote cap. No fixed close date beyond an open cycle. No public nominee count for 2025 or 2026. None of that is a flaw in this guide; it is the actual shape of what MyHorryNews has made public so far.

A business that finds its own category missing from the small set confirmed here shouldn't read that as exclusion. It reads as a program that, so far, hasn't put its full ballot in front of anyone outside MyHorryNews's own platform.

SecondStreet, three rival ballots, and a different vertical entirely

SecondStreet is the platform underneath myhorrynews.secondstreetapp.com, the same category of contest software several other local newspapers lean on for their own readers-choice ballots. That's a mechanical detail, not a brand name most voters recognize, but it explains the voting screen's shape: category browsing, a nomination stage ahead of an open vote, and a results process the newspaper controls end to end rather than farming out to a generic app.

Three other organizations run their own, separate Grand Strand best-of ballots in roughly the same season. WMBF News runs Best of the Grand Strand on its own station site. The Post and Courier runs a program often called Grand Strand's Greatest through its own contest network. And The Sun News runs Best of the Beach at votethebeach.com, backed by a marketing budget MyHorryNews hasn't disclosed a comparable figure for. Four organizers, four platforms, one metro area, and none of the four shares a vote count or a combined leaderboard with any other.

None of this is a sport fan-vote poll, either, which is worth separating out. South Carolina runs plenty of those too, the Greenville News Athlete of the Week and the South Carolina Mr. Football Reader Poll among them, but those crown a weekly or seasonal athlete, not a local business. A restaurant or shop nominated for Myrtle Beach Herald Readers' Choice sits in an entirely different competition, with different rules, a different organizer, and a different platform.

A campaign built around the wrong assumption, that a single "Myrtle Beach best-of" win covers all four business ballots, misrepresents what actually happened. "Winner, Myrtle Beach Herald Readers' Choice, Best TV Station" names something specific and checkable. "Myrtle Beach's best" does not. The general discipline behind any readers'-choice or award-style push applies here the same as anywhere else; award-style vote campaign guidance covers ground that doesn't change from ballot to ballot, platform included.

Horry County's towns don't all reach for the same ballot

Horry County stretches well past the Myrtle Beach city line, and MyHorryNews's own name, not MyMyrtleBeachNews, signals that reach directly. Conway sits inland as the county seat. North Myrtle Beach and Little River anchor the northern end near the state line. Murrells Inlet and Pawleys Island run south along the coast. Surfside Beach and Loris fill in the middle and the rural western edge.

A restaurant in Murrells Inlet and a restaurant in Conway both qualify for the same readers-choice program, but they aren't competing for the same customer base, and a campaign that treats Horry County as one undifferentiated audience wastes effort. Coastal towns pull from vacationers and second-home owners for a good chunk of the year. Conway and Loris pull from residents first, full stop.

Food and beverage nominees make up a large share of any readers-choice ballot this broad. Businesses weighing that category specifically can check restaurant vote campaign guidance for pacing reminders that fit a platform structured like MyHorryNews's, not a generic one.

Running a Myrtle Beach Herald campaign without overclaiming a result

Start with the live platform, not a memory of last year. myhorrynews.secondstreetapp.com is the only place that reflects this cycle's actual category names and open dates. Nothing else, not a rival program's calendar, not an assumption carried over from 2025, should stand in for checking it directly.

Real customers. A real link, the exact one MyHorryNews issues for the business's own category. Repeated reminders across the open window instead of one message at the very end. That combination outperforms guesswork every time, and it's the only version of a campaign that survives scrutiny if a competitor or the organizer ever asks how the votes came in.

Scripted votes and fake accounts put more than a single cycle at risk. In a county-wide program covering towns as small as Loris and Little River, an inflated claim gets noticed by exactly the neighbors it was meant to impress. Save "winner" for the year MyHorryNews actually prints it, and name the category alongside the year every time.

Our guide to how online contest votes work covers the mechanics that carry over from one readers-choice ballot to the next, and is buying votes legal is worth reading before any budget goes toward a Myrtle Beach Herald push specifically.