Submit Form PHP amend to JQuery AJAX

I'm looking to convert the below php form submission to a JQuery Ajax submission. I have used Ajax with some simple requests before, but I'm not sure how to submit and return data from MySQL for the below code.

The code below submits the user input entry to a MySql query returning single columns rows. A While loop then looks at these rows and fires another mysql query returning the number of user likes per row.

<?php

if(!empty($_POST['Message']))
{
      $userid = session_id();
      $searchStr = get_post($con,'Message');
      $aKeyword = explode(" ", $searchStr);

      $aKeyword = array_filter($aKeyword);

      $stmt = $con->prepare(
          'SELECT m.ID, m.MessageText 
          FROM MessageMain m 
          LEFT OUTER JOIN Likes l on m.ID = l.PostID 
          WHERE MessageText REGEXP ?
          GROUP BY m.ID, m.MessageText ORDER BY count(m.id) desc'
      );

      $regexString = implode('|', $aKeyword);
      $stmt->bind_param('s', $regexString);
      $stmt->execute();
      $result = $stmt->get_result();

       $rowcount=mysqli_num_rows($result);

       echo "<pre> Returned ".  $rowcount . " matches</pre>";

     if(mysqli_num_rows($result) > 0) {
        $row_count=0;
        While($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) {   
            $postid = $row['ID'];
            $row_count++;

                    // Checking user status
                    $status_query = $con->prepare("SELECT COUNT(*) AS type FROM likes WHERE userid = ? AND postid = ?");
                    $status_query->bind_param('ss',$userid,$postid);
                    $status_query->execute();
                    $status_result = $status_query->get_result();
                    $status_row = $status_result->fetch_assoc();
                    $type = $status_row['type'];

                    // Count post total likes
                    $like_query = $con->prepare("SELECT COUNT(*) AS cntLikes FROM likes WHERE postid = ?");
                    $like_query->bind_param('s',$postid);
                    $like_query->execute();
                    $like_result = $like_query->get_result();
                    $like_row = $like_result->fetch_assoc();
                    $total_likes = $like_row['cntLikes'];

?>
                    <div class="post">
                        <div class="post-text">
            <?php

            echo nl2br(htmlentities($row['MessageText'],ENT_COMPAT|ENT_IGNORE, "UTF-8") );

            ?>

             </div>
                        <div class="post-action">

                            <input type="button" value="Like" id="like_<?php echo htmlentities($postid . "_" . $userid); ?>" class="like" style="<?php if($type == 1){ echo "color: #ffa449;"; } ?>" />&nbsp;(<span id="likes_<?php echo $postid . "_" . $userid; ?>"><?php echo htmlentities($total_likes); ?></span>)&nbsp;

                        </div>
                    </div>
        <?php 
                }

    }

}

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