Of 113 Phoenix-area small-business Facebook pages we read by hand in September 2026, 32 (28%) had not posted in the last 90 days, and 22 (19%) had not posted in more than a year. The gap between industries is wide: 6 of 10 accountants' pages were quiet 90 days or more, against 1 of 10 electricians'.
This is the first original study on boomp.net about the market rather than about our own customers. We built a defined sample of 578 businesses across twelve industries, read each business's own website, read YouTube through its official interface, and read a fixed subsample of Facebook pages the way a reporter would: by hand, in a browser, one at a time. The weaknesses are in the Methodology and Limitations sections below, before the conclusions.
What we measured
- Linked social presence. For each business whose website we could read (501 of 578), how many social profiles the site links to, and which platforms.
- Website freshness. The most recent change date the site reports in its own sitemap, where it reports one.
- YouTube last upload. For businesses whose site links a YouTube channel (119), the date of the newest upload.
- Facebook last post. For a fixed subsample of 120 businesses whose site links a Facebook page, the date of the most recent post visible on the page. This is the headline measure. 113 pages resolved; 6 pages had been removed and 1 could not be reached.
Facebook: the headline, by industry
Each row is the pages we read for that industry. "Quiet 90+" means the newest post was more than 90 days old on September 21, 2026.
| Industry | Pages read | Quiet 30+ days | Quiet 90+ days | Quiet 180+ days |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Accountants | 10 | 6 (60%) | 6 (60%) | 5 (50%) |
| Dentists | 9 | 4 (44%) | 4 (44%) | 3 (33%) |
| Roofers | 9 | 5 (56%) | 3 (33%) | 3 (33%) |
| Hair salons | 9 | 5 (56%) | 3 (33%) | 3 (33%) |
| Plumbers | 10 | 4 (40%) | 3 (30%) | 1 (10%) |
| Med spas and day spas | 10 | 3 (30%) | 3 (30%) | 3 (30%) |
| Chiropractors | 10 | 5 (50%) | 3 (30%) | 1 (10%) |
| HVAC | 9 | 3 (33%) | 2 (22%) | 2 (22%) |
| Law firms | 9 | 2 (22%) | 2 (22%) | 2 (22%) |
| Landscapers | 9 | 4 (44%) | 1 (11%) | 1 (11%) |
| Auto repair | 9 | 1 (11%) | 1 (11%) | 1 (11%) |
| Electricians | 10 | 2 (20%) | 1 (10%) | 1 (10%) |
| All industries | 113 | 44 (39%) | 32 (28%) | 26 (23%) |
The full distribution of the 113 pages: 69 (61%) had posted within 30 days, 12 (11%) between 31 and 90 days ago, 6 (5%) between 91 and 180 days, 4 (4%) between 181 and 365 days, and 22 (19%) more than a year ago. No page in the subsample had zero posts.
Per-industry rows rest on 9 or 10 pages each, so read them as a ranking of who tends to go quiet, not as precise rates. The all-industries row is the number we would cite.
Linked social presence
Of the 501 business websites we could read, 136 (27%) link to no social profile at all. 76 (15%) link to exactly one. 289 (58%) link to two or more.
| Platform linked from the website | Businesses (of 501) | Share |
|---|---|---|
| 334 | 67% | |
| 269 | 54% | |
| YouTube | 119 | 24% |
| 104 | 21% | |
| X | 99 | 20% |
| TikTok | 58 | 12% |
| 27 | 5% | |
| Nextdoor | 9 | 2% |
A business can have a profile it never links from its site, so these are floors, not counts of accounts that exist. What they do measure is whether the business itself points customers at the profile.
Website freshness
Of the 501 readable websites, 362 publish a sitemap with a last-modified date. Where the date exists, 317 sites (63% of all 501) changed something within the last twelve months and 45 (9%) reported nothing newer than a year old. The remaining 139 (28%) publish no usable date, and we count them as unknown rather than stale.
| Most recent sitemap change | Websites (of 501) | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Within 12 months | 317 | 63% |
| Older than 12 months | 45 | 9% |
| Unknown (no date published) | 139 | 28% |
YouTube last upload
Counts only. 119 businesses link a YouTube channel from their website and 115 resolved. 43 had uploaded within 30 days, 18 between 31 and 90 days ago, 3 between 91 and 180 days, 8 between 181 and 365 days, and 43 more than a year ago. 4 could not be resolved to a channel. Put another way, of the businesses that bothered to link a YouTube channel, 51 of 115 (44%) had not uploaded in six months.
What this means for a Phoenix business owner
The Facebook page is still the profile most Phoenix small businesses point customers at, and more than one in four of those pages has gone silent for a season or longer. A customer who checks before calling sees a last post from spring, or from two years ago, and draws a conclusion about whether the business is still open and still paying attention. Nothing on the page says otherwise.
Some industries fare far worse than others. Professional services, accountants and dentists in our subsample, go quiet most; trades that depend on a steady stream of local jobs, electricians and auto repair, keep posting. That fits how the work flows: an owner who is busy in the field tends to stop being the one who also runs the page.
The fix is not more effort. It is deciding that the page will be kept current whether or not the owner has time this week, and setting that up once. Three posts a week, sustained for a year, beats a burst every January.
Methodology
- Business list. Google Places API (New) Text Search, twelve queries (one per industry), restricted to a rectangle from 33.20, -112.40 (southwest) to 33.75, -111.60 (northeast) that covers Phoenix, Scottsdale, Tempe, Mesa, Chandler, Gilbert, Glendale and Peoria. Results were taken in Google's relevance order, page by page, until 50 included businesses per industry or five pages, whichever came first. We did not choose businesses by hand.
- Industries. Plumbers, roofers, HVAC, electricians, dentists, med spas and day spas, hair salons, chiropractors, auto repair, landscapers, law firms, accountants. Ten industries were filtered to their Google primary type; HVAC and landscaping have no Google type of their own and were filtered to the two types Google returns them under.
- Exclusions. 727 results were examined and 149 were excluded: 82 for the wrong primary type, 45 with no website, 10 returned twice under different queries (kept once), 8 for a website shared by more than two businesses (chains), 2 with a website on a social or directory host, 2 with no ratings. 578 businesses were included: between 39 and 50 per industry.
- Website read. One read per business of its own website, on September 21, 2026: robots.txt first (we honor it; 11 sites disallowed us and were not read), then the homepage and sitemap, with a named research user agent, a 15 second timeout and a one-second pause between sites. 501 of 578 responded with a page; 48 refused our user agent with a 403, which we recorded and did not work around.
- Social links. Profile links found on the homepage. Share buttons, embedded plugins and tracking pixels were not counted.
- YouTube. The YouTube Data API, through its official channel and playlist interfaces, for the newest upload on each linked channel.
- Facebook. From the 334 businesses whose website links a Facebook page, a fixed random subsample of 10 per industry (120 pages) was drawn with a published seed. A person opened each page in a browser on September 21, 2026 and recorded the date of the most recent post, or that the page was removed or unreachable. No script requested any Facebook page.
- Buckets. Days are counted from September 21, 2026. "0-30" means 0 to 30 days inclusive, "31-90" means 31 to 90, and so on; "365+" means more than 365 days.
- Go/no-go. Before any of this page was written, we fixed a rule for whether it would be published at all: at least 100 Facebook pages read, at least 8 per industry, and either 25% or more quiet at 90 days or a 20-point spread between industries. All four conditions passed. Had they failed, the collectors and counts would have stayed in our records and nothing would have been published.
Limitations
- The Facebook number is a subsample of 113, not all 578. We read the pages by hand because Meta's Platform Terms (section 3.2.3) forbid automated collection from Facebook and Instagram without written permission. A hand-read subsample of about ten per industry is enough for the overall rate and for a ranking of industries; it is not enough to state any single industry's rate precisely.
- Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn were not read at all, for the same reason, plus Instagram's login wall for anonymous visitors. A business could be quiet on Facebook and active on Instagram. We make no claim either way.
- Sitemap dates are self-reported and often missing. 28% of sites publish no date. A site can also change without updating its sitemap, or ship a sitemap that stamps every page with today's date. Treat website freshness as the weakest measure here.
- Google's relevance order is not a random sample of all businesses. It favors businesses Google already ranks well, which likely means businesses with more reviews and better-kept web presences. If anything, that biases this study toward the active end.
- One metro, one month. Phoenix in September 2026. We do not know how far this carries to other regions or seasons.
- Small industries. Nine or ten pages per industry. A single page moves an industry's rate by ten points.
- Websites that refused us are missing from every measure. 66 sites, disproportionately those behind bot-blocking services, are not in the presence or freshness counts.
Get the data
The aggregate dataset is a CSV of industry, measure, bucket and count: phoenix-social-staleness-2026.csv. It contains no business names, websites or page addresses, and none will be released. You are welcome to cite it with a link to this page under the Boomp terms of service; the citation block at the end of this page has the format.
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