Can you provide suggestions on how Twitter could help in my industry with promotional products/branded merchandise?
- promotional products

There’s a couple good uses for Twitter that come to mind.  The first two are good for anybody, but the third suggestion below should be particularly useful for your industry.

1.) Run specials.  People are always looking for a deal.  Twitter is a channel that makes it very easy for your customers to get notice about time-sensitive discounts.  When your suppliers run a special on a particular item (or maybe even when they don’t) send an offer for that item to your followers on Twitter.  You’ll need to do this with some frequency so you can train your followers to look for these deals.

2.) Talk about key topics.  People do searches for tweets that talk abou the topics that interest them.  So talk about golf and golf courses.  The people finding your tweets will be people who are more likely to want branded golf supplies.

3.) Follow conferences.  South by South West is a huge music, movie, and tech conference that encourages people attending and talking about the conference on Twitter to include #sxsw in their tweets so that a simple search will return all of the dialogue about this conference.  Other conferences are following suit with their own unique versions of #sxsw.  Seek these out and follow the conversations about who had the best (and more importantly worst!) swag.  That’s a prospect list.