Social Media Geographic Information: Why social is special when it goes spatial?

This contribution introduces the concept of Social Media Geographic Information (SMGI) as a specific type of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). Unlike other kind of VGI, which may originate from geographic measurements crowdsourcing, SMGI brings in addition a special potential for it may express community perceptions, interests, needs, and behaviors. Hence, SMGI may represent an unprecedented resource for expressing pluralism in such domains as spatial planning, where it may convey the community collective preferences contributing to enrich knowledge able to inform design and decision making. In the light of these assumptions, the main issues relevant for SMGI collection and analytics are presented from the perspective of the spatial planning and governance domain, and a framework for the SMGI analytics in planning, design, and decision making is proposed.