Explore Content Automation in Confluence Cloud

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Today, we’re going to talk about content automation in the Cloud, and how a Cloud workflow can work for businesses. Since launching our Workflows app, we’ve been closely monitoring how people are using it and the results it’s yielding for them. Now, we’re going to explore it even more! 

Using Confluence Cloud, creating an internal knowledge base or external facing site content enables your business to keep valuable information in one place, making it easily accessible for all users. What Workflows enables you to do is add a process to your content within Confluence. You can create a cloud-based workflow. 

Before Workflows, this kind of functionality wasn’t available on the Cloud! Here’s how this content management workflow software could work for you, whether you use Confluence for external or internal document management: 

External fresh content is a winner

From a user journey perspective, having regular fresh content on your external site is important for engagement purposes. If a user becomes invested in your external-facing site, fresh content helps maintain this relationship. This in turn gives websites a boost in traffic and organic performance. We know this because when Google crawls websites, it recognises when fresh content has been uploaded. Google then indexes that content, which helps towards higher rankings in the SERP, thus being readily available for users above the scroll. 

The team at SEO Digital Group said it themselves: “Fresh, engaging content will bring new visitors to your site and keep old visitors coming. Content can attract visitors that may not have sought out your products or services before, but who may be converted to customers through careful content writing, re-targeting, and conversion rate optimisation.” 

And when we talk about content, we don’t just mean standard service pages or blog posts. It’s much more than that! Using Confluence, you can publish external-facing news articles around hot topics and frequent updates. It’s been recognised by Google’s very own Amit Singhal that the types of keyword searches that require regular fresh content (for better organic performance) align with these content types. 

What Workflows does is enables users to implement different expiration's on pages, which ensures freshness of content. Workflows also enables quick, easy approvals and publishing of fresh content. Adding new pages creates a new link for your website with a fresh, unique URL. Building these new URLs is imperative for traffic and ranking performance. 

Sharing important information internally

On the flip-side, it’s just as important to automate your internal content too. Many businesses adopt Confluence as a way of systematically creating an internal knowledge base, where users within different teams in an organisation can access information quickly and easily.  

We spoke about this in depth in our previous article, but with Workflows’ new UI, drag and drop interface and architecture, businesses can essentially control EVERY SMALL DETAIL of a workflow. We know this includes all the different stages within the Trigger, Logic and Actions. But in addition to this, users can also do the following:  

• Make changes to page visibility depending on immediate requirements  

• Edit page permissions to ensure clean, straightforward processes that get content published faster 

• Edit expiration's. This is a sure-fire way to ensure fresh content is constant, and any time-sensitive content is updated regularly. You wouldn’t want to set short expiration's on evergreen content, but it is worth checking it every so often to make sure nothing has changed 

• Automate approvals. We talk a lot about approvals, but they’re pivotal to the structure of Workflows and getting the most out of it. If you’re working on a piece of regulatory content for internal purposes that needs approval from other users, this entire process can be automated. 

So, whether your priority with Confluence is external or internal content, deploying Workflows allows you to automate your approvals and permissions processes, making fresh content creation and publication a seamless experience for all involved. 

Summary

On one hand, using Workflows is ideal for managing the content behind an external-facing website as it provides a sound QA process for content before it goes live. 

On the other hand, it’s also positive for internal purposes. It ensures all information is up to date with automated expiration's, it keeps content accurate and makes it accessible for the people who need it most.  

Leave your comments

Have you tried Workflows for Confluence yet? Has it opened your eyes to a whole new world of content automation and Cloud Workflow software? Feel free to add your thoughts in the comments below!