I recently spent some time browsing my company’s Confluence knowledge base and noticed that a LOT of articles didn’t have any labels. I’d bet this is because labels are mostly hidden when you’re writing pages - there’s no obvious spot to add labels during editing, and after you publish they’re waaaay down at the bottom. I imagine that many folks simply don’t know they’re a thing, or completely forget they’re there.

This is a bit of shame, since labels are a great way to help organize and drive content. They’re not even a foreign concept, since I’d bet many of us are already familiar with the concept of labels under a different name - hashtags. Platforms like twitter use hashtags to help folks find and organize content, much the same way Confluence uses labels. We’ve all seen tweets with a whole bunch of different hashtags related to the content - so why not do this with kb articles?

Labeling an article doesn’t take much time and has a lot of benefits. It helps the search function find things, but also drives gadgets like “content by label”, making dynamic page construction a lot easier. The few seconds an author takes to hit the “L” key and type in some keywords will definitely pay off, especially as your kb grows in size.

In addition to helping folks consume your content, it will make your life easier when you have to update things. For example if your onboarding process changes, you can just search for the onboarding label and know what to edit. You can even add a specific label to help you find content that might need to be updated regularly (I tend to add “monthly-review” to articles like this).

Depending on your needs, an article may end up having several labels (or more!) - and that’s ok! As long as each label is there for a reason and ties into the content, it doesn’t hurt anything, it just makes it easier to find and sort content.

This is a great feature that I think is really underutilized - be sure to check it out and see what you can do with them.