Best of the Grand Strand: How Voting Works & How to Win

wmbfnews.com/page/best-of-the-grand-strand/ is not the Grand Strand's only 'best of' ballot

wmbfnews.com/page/best-of-the-grand-strand/. One URL, one NBC affiliate, and not the only "best of" ballot working this particular stretch of South Carolina coastline. Worth saying plainly, right up front: WMBF News, the Grand Strand's Nexstar-owned NBC station, runs Best of the Grand Strand at that exact address, as its own program, apart from MyHorryNews's Myrtle Beach Herald Readers' Choice Awards.

A business that has heard of "the Myrtle Beach best-of vote" secondhand, from a customer or a competitor, cannot safely assume which one that means. Two organizations, two web addresses, two separate ballots, covering a lot of the same ground.

That last row matters more than it looks. Nothing in what's publicly confirmed states how many categories WMBF runs, when nominations open, or what the per-person limit is. Rather than borrow those numbers from a rival Grand Strand program, this guide leaves them blank and points to the one page that actually has the current answer.

How Best of the Grand Strand stacks up against its two market rivals

Three organizations run a "best of" vote for roughly the same stretch of coast this year, and a nominee thanking "everyone who voted for us on the Grand Strand" without saying which one leaves half the audience guessing. WMBF is one. MyHorryNews's Myrtle Beach Herald Readers' Choice is the second, built on the myhorrynews.secondstreetapp.com platform with broad Horry County category coverage. In an odd twist, WMBF has actually been named Best TV Station inside that separate program five years running, which only underlines how distinct the two ballots really are. The Sun News and MyrtleBeachOnline.com's Best of the Beach is the third, run at votethebeach.com, backed by a marketing push reported north of $100,000, with the 2026 cycle closing around June 19.

The blank cells above are not a shortcut. They are the honest state of what each organizer has actually made public as of this writing. A business weighing all three should treat every row as a reason to check that program's own live page, not evidence that one ballot's rules explain another's.

South Carolina runs a similar split further down the coast. The Best of Charleston guide covers how Charleston City Paper spreads its own ballot across two separate URLs, and Charleston Magazine's Best Of covers a program that blends editorial picks with reader nominations instead of one open public vote. Different coastline, same underlying lesson: check which specific program a nominee is actually in before promising supporters anything.

What's actually confirmed about how the WMBF ballot works

Nomination window, category count, vote cap, close date. A voter arriving at a fan-vote page usually wants all four before doing anything else. For Best of the Grand Strand, exactly one of those four is confirmed anywhere publicly available: the page itself, wmbfnews.com/page/best-of-the-grand-strand/. The other three sit outside whatever WMBF has chosen to make public so far.

That gap is not the same as nothing being knowable. It means the live page, not a cached description or a rival program's rulebook, is the only place a current answer exists right now. WMBF runs the Grand Strand's NBC newscast, so once a cycle closes, a results announcement most plausibly reaches viewers through the station's own digital write-up or an on-air segment rather than a standalone leaderboard site. That's a reasonable read of what kind of organization WMBF is, not a confirmed publication date.

Check wmbfnews.com/page/best-of-the-grand-strand/ directly before building anything: the current cycle's categories, any per-device or per-day limit, and the actual close date. None of the three should be assumed to match Herald Readers' Choice, Best of the Beach, or a prior year's WMBF page. A campaign built on borrowed rules risks colliding with the real ones the moment the live page updates.

The Grand Strand runs from Little River to Murrells Inlet, not just the boardwalk

Myrtle Beach anchors the name, but the Grand Strand is a roughly 60-mile run of South Carolina coast, and WMBF's own market covers a lot more than the boardwalk and the Ferris wheel. North Myrtle Beach sits at the northern end near the North Carolina line, a separate municipality with its own city government and its own dense strip of hotels and restaurants. Little River, smaller and more fishing-village in character, sits just south of that state line too.

South of Myrtle Beach proper, Surfside Beach brands itself the family beach, and Garden City runs a quieter, more residential stretch along the same coast. Murrells Inlet, a few miles further south, built its identity around seafood restaurants and a marsh-walk waterfront, a genuinely different feel from Myrtle Beach's amusement-park corridor even though both fall under the same general Grand Strand label. Conway, inland and away from the beach entirely, is Horry County's seat and home to Coastal Carolina University; it sits inside the same media market WMBF covers even though nobody would call it a beach town.

Pawleys Island and Georgetown sit at the southern edge of how some maps draw "the Grand Strand," and other sources treat them as their own separate stretch of coast entirely. Nothing confirmed here settles that boundary question one way or the other, so a business right on that line is better off checking directly with WMBF than assuming either way.

What that spread means for a fan-vote campaign: a North Myrtle Beach business and a Murrells Inlet business plausibly compete in the same category on the same statewide-feeling ballot, despite sitting roughly 25 miles and a genuinely different beach-town culture apart. Category placement, not zip code, is what should decide how a campaign gets built.

What a real Grand Strand campaign looks like, and when 'we won' is actually true

Real customers, sent to the correct page, reminded more than once. That's the whole playbook for any fan-vote program with a confirmed URL and little else confirmed. A single Facebook post the day nominations open rarely survives a multi-week window; a business that reminds its actual customer base every so often, right up until whatever date wmbfnews.com/page/best-of-the-grand-strand/ eventually states, tends to do better.

Local specificity still counts even without a published category list. A Murrells Inlet restaurant sending regulars a direct link works the same way a Little River charter captain sending clients one does: name the business, name the category if one is confirmed, and always send the actual voting page rather than a general "we're up for Best of the Grand Strand" post that leaves a supporter to go searching. For the general mechanics behind a push like that, how online contest votes work covers ground that applies no matter which Grand Strand ballot a business is running on, and award-style vote campaigns goes further into readers-choice-specific pacing.

Saying "we won" carries weight only once WMBF actually publishes it, through the station's site, a broadcast segment, or both. "Best of the Grand Strand, [category], as named by WMBF News" is a claim a reader can check. A bare "Grand Strand's best" with no organizer, year, or category attached is not, and it risks getting confused with a win from an entirely different program covering the same coastline. Before spending any budget on a push like this, is buying votes legal is worth reading, and the South Carolina contest hub lists every other program this guide tracks statewide, from Greenville News Athlete of the Week to the SC Mr. Football Reader Poll, for side-by-side comparison.