[photorized]

Almost every online marketer does this type of automation. As you said, they goal is to get real people to look at their account, and to hopefully follow them.

This is mild, comparing to some of the other activity that goes on.

[tapirl]

Some ones market nothing, their intention is just to get more followers. Maybe they will marketing something later.

I know such a bot, it gets 100+ new followers every day, all of them are really people.

[tripzilch]

How do you know they are really people? That behaviour is exactly what one would program a bot to do when interacting with unknown accounts.