FANCY being Facebook friends with your boss? Or being allowed to Snapchat your colleagues during office hours?

Well, this kind of office-based social networking is growing in popularity as a way of escaping the tyranny of corporate e-mail.

Businesses wanting to streamline internal communications are turning to chat apps like Chatter, Slack and Yammer, as well as more established platforms like Facebook.

The market for enterprise social software, as it’s called, will be worth more than $8b (£5.3bn) by 2019, up from about $5 billion now, according to research firm Markets And Markets.

We’ve had company intranets for almost 20 years, but it’s the mobile-friendly nature of many messaging apps that is shaking up this space.

In January 2015, Facebook unveiled its new business networking platform, Facebook At Work and has just launched an associated chat client, Work Chat.

Most of us are used to social media in our private lives, but what about for work?

The social networking giant, with its 1.5 billion users, seems to want to dominate the corporate market, as well as the private sphere.

Facebook has signed up about 300 companies of varying sizes, including Heineken, Lagardere and Hootsuite.

By far the largest deal it’s struck so far is with Royal Bank Of Scotland, which announced in late October that following a successful pilot programme it will be rolling out Facebook At Work to all 100,000 employees in 2016.

Kevin Hanley, the director of design at RBS says it’s all about facilitating collaboration between different arms of the business. Facebook At Work is a key component in driving a more transparent, engaged, collaborative, culture, he said.