Best of the Beach: How Voting Works & How to Win

One ballot, a six-figure push, and a June deadline most campaigns underestimate

Best of the Beach is The Sun News and MyrtleBeachOnline.com's annual readers' poll for the Myrtle Beach, South Carolina area, run at votethebeach.com. Nominations feed a public ballot promoted with more than $100,000 in print, digital, and social spend, and the 2026 voting window closes around June 19.

Six figures. That's roughly what The Sun News and MyrtleBeachOnline.com put behind promoting this single ballot, spread across print, digital, and social. Most single-market readers' polls don't spend anywhere near that to fill out their category list. Best of the Beach does, and the effect shows up in how competitive even a niche category can get by the time the ballot closes.

The 2026 window runs toward a close around June 19. That's a tighter runway than the month-long votes some statewide programs hold, so a business waiting until the ballot is already public to start telling customers has given away most of its own campaign window before it even opens.

What this page won't do is invent a category count or a nominee list Best of the Beach hasn't published. See the South Carolina contest hub for how this program sits alongside the state's other fan-vote and readers-choice programs.

What Best of the Beach hasn't published, and why that's the actual gap to plan around

No public category list. No searchable nominee roster. No winners archive going back through prior cycles. That's not a reporting shortfall in this guide; it's the actual state of the public record for this program, and it changes how a campaign should be planned versus a ballot that publishes everything up front.

The safest move is checking the live ballot, not last year's memory

votethebeach.com is the only source that reliably reflects the current year's category names, nomination status, and voting rule. A business that assumes this year's ballot mirrors last year's, down to the category label, risks nominating into a group that's been renamed or merged. Confirm the exact wording on the live site before telling a single customer where to click.

That gap also means old screenshots and third-party "past winners" pages floating around the Grand Strand aren't a safe source for a current claim. If a competitor's marketing cites a Best of the Beach win, the only way to verify it is the year and category, checked against The Sun News's own published result, not a general reputation for having "won before."

The broader discipline of separating a confirmed placement from a vague reputation claim applies to any readers' poll a business enters; see award-style vote campaign guidance for how that plays out beyond this one ballot.

How the $100,000 marketing push actually changes campaign math

A poll this well-funded pulls a different kind of voter than a small local paper's best-of feature. The Sun News isn't relying on a business's own outreach to fill the ballot with traffic; its own print, digital, and social spend is already doing that work at scale.

That cuts both ways for a nominee. On one hand, a category can see real turnout even without heavy self-promotion, since the organizer's own promotion is already driving visitors to votethebeach.com. On the other, that same spend means every competitor in a crowded category, say, restaurants or hotels along the Grand Strand, is getting exposed to the same ballot through the same channels. Standing out inside a well-promoted category takes more than existing on it.

None of that changes what's actually allowed. Real customers, a real business connection, no scripted votes. For businesses weighing whether a restaurant-specific push makes sense here, restaurant vote campaign guidance covers the category-matching logic that applies just as directly to a Grand Strand seafood spot as anywhere else.

Grand Strand geography still decides who a nominee is actually reaching

Myrtle Beach anchors the ballot's name, but the coverage area runs well past the city line. Conway, Surfside Beach, Murrells Inlet, Little River, Pawleys Island, North Myrtle Beach, and Loris all fall inside The Sun News's readership, and a nominee's actual customer base usually clusters in just one or two of those towns, not all eight.

A Murrells Inlet seafood restaurant and a Conway hardware store both technically sit inside the same Best of the Beach coverage area. They aren't reaching the same voter, though, and copying one town's outreach plan onto the other wastes the tighter runway a June close already imposes. Businesses balancing a Best of the Beach push against consumer visibility built around one person, a chef, an owner, a local personality, can also check personal-brand vote outreach guidance for compliant framing that names a real principal alongside the votethebeach.com link.

Running a Best of the Beach campaign without overstating anything

Start from whatever rule votethebeach.com posts on the live 2026 ballot. Nothing else, not last year's cap, not a competitor's claimed loophole, outranks that.

Fake accounts. Scripted votes. Calling a nominee a "winner" before The Sun News says so in print. All three show up in the final week of a tight June close, when a campaign panics that it's behind. None of them are worth the risk against a news brand that's already spending six figures to keep eyes on its own ballot.

A short, specific reminder beats a vague one: name the category, the exact business name as listed, and the votethebeach.com link, sent more than once before the ~June 19 close rather than saved for a single loud push at the end. Our vote campaign overview covers where paid promotion support reasonably ends and an organizer's own rules begin, useful reading before the ballot goes live rather than during the final week.