For all ya'll thinking that Twitter is about a bunch of nitwits with too much time on their hands and a need to blast thoughts out into the interwebz, you're wrong. And if you own a restaurant and think that, you're wrongier.

1)  Twitter begins with number of followers. Because guess what, if you have 300 or so followers and you post that you are open, not enough people are gonna care. 

1a) Twitter is now starting to be about lists because really, if someone has a lot of followers but is not on many lists, no one actually listens to him/her.

2)  Twitter is about the customer and the future customer, not about you. Sure, you want to inject some personality into your Twitter stream because people like to engage with people rather than bots. But remember, your conversation should be focused on how much you can engage the customer, not how important you think you are.

3) Twitter is not about blasting out promotions all the livelong day. It is a conversation, it is engagement. Certain people (actual celebrities and really really clever twitterers) can manage a one-way street approach. The rest of us must actually engage with people.

3a) Note to celebrities: Since everyone wants to figure out how to bring you down, you might want to consider engaging anyway, even though you don't need to, because people end up thinking you are a megalomaniac if you don't.  Really clever twitterers (example being @shitmydadsays) are exempted from this as they spend their entire stream making us laugh so hard the coffee comes out our nose.

3) Twitter, for restaurants, is about location-based services. If you don't know what that means, I'll explain it this way: It is about getting butts from the surrounding area into your restaurant to sit down and order, and it even works for high-end places and not just burger joints — if it is managed by someone who knows how to converge technology and marketing, not someone who can think up a cute promotion or pitch a clever story.

3a) Look into Loopt to see a bit of what I am talking about here, but if you don't know what the term "location-based services" is, time to hire a professional.  If you have a professional, ask what their strategy is in this area and if they don't have a long answer, fire their ass.