How to use AI to find your audience's real problems on LinkedIn
The LinkedIn posts everyone scrolls past are your best market research
Your competitors are reading the comments. You should be reading the complaints.
There’s a difference. Comments are generally where people agree. Complaints are where they tell you what’s actually broken in their work or their process. I think the majority of people scrolling LinkedIn skim the comments and skip the complaints, because complaints are usually buried three replies deep in a thread about something else entirely.
And that’s the gap. Everyone in your niche is publicly narrating their problems on LinkedIn right now, in posts, in comments, in the replies to other people’s posts. No amount of guessing or formal market research delivers this intel as fast or as cheaply.
This article gives you 8 prompts that turn LinkedIn into a research tool. You’ll pull real language from real posts, sort it into patterns, and end up with a shortlist of problems worth solving, and crucially, in words your audience already uses.
Why this works now
Like all social platforms, LinkedIn’s algorithm rewards posts that get engagement. This means the platform is full of people venting, asking, and comparing notes in public. That’s free research sitting in plain sight. AI makes it usable because it can read fifty posts and group the patterns in minutes, something that would take you an entire afternoon by hand. You don’t need a survey. You need fifteen minutes and the right prompt.
Prompt 1: The struggle scrape
What it does: Pulls the recurring problems mentioned across a batch of LinkedIn posts or comments from your niche.
When to use it: Right at the start, before you do anything else. This is your raw material.
The Prompt:
I’m going to paste a batch of LinkedIn posts and comments from people in [YOUR NICHE]. Read through all of them and pull out every specific problem, frustration, or struggle mentioned, even small ones. For each one, quote the exact phrase they used and note who said it (just their role or title, not their name). Don’t summarise or interpret yet. Just extract. Posts: [PASTE POSTS]
How to use it:
Go to LinkedIn and search a keyword or hashtag tied to your niche
Copy 15 to 20 posts and their top comments into a doc
Paste the lot into the prompt and run it
Example input: I’m going to paste a batch of LinkedIn posts and comments from people in freelance copywriting. [20 posts pasted]
What you’ll get: A list of 30 to 50 quoted frustrations, each tagged with the poster’s role. Some will repeat. That’s the point.
Advanced note: Don’t clean the posts before pasting them. Typos, ALL CAPS, and rambling are signal. AI will smooth them out if you ask it to summarise too early, and you’ll lose the texture that makes a problem feel real.
That prompt alone will hand you a raw list of problems straight from the people who have them, no guessing required.
But one list of quotes is just that, a list, not a strategy. The next 7 prompts turn that list into something you can actually act on.
Here’s what’s behind the paywall:
Prompt 2, the pattern sorter: Groups your raw quotes into 5 to 8 actual themes instead of 40 scattered complaints.
Prompt 3, the frequency ranker: Tells you which problems show up again and again versus which ones are one-off noise.
Prompt 4, the language miner: Extracts the exact words and phrases your audience uses, so your content stops sounding like a textbook.
Prompt 5, the hidden problem finder: Surfaces the struggles people imply but never say outright, the ones competitors miss.
Prompt 6, the content angle generator: Turns each pattern into 3 ready-to-use post or email angles.
Prompt 7, the audience segment splitter: Shows you which struggles belong to which sub-group inside your niche, so you stop writing to an imaginary “everyone.”
Prompt 8, the validation check: Cross-checks a problem you think you’ve found against a fresh batch of posts, so you’re not building on a fluke.
Plus: a one-page pain language tracker, a simple log for the exact phrases people use, so the patterns build across weeks instead of resetting every time you do this.
If you only do one thing this week, run Prompt 1 on twenty posts and read what comes back. If you want the system that turns that into a repeatable research habit, the rest is one upgrade away.
Upgrade to get all 8 prompts, the pain language tracker, and the full step-by-step sequence.